


Escape Performance

by trankvilizator



Category: YG Entertainment | YG Family, Zion.T (Singer)
Genre: M/M, One Night Stands, Open Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-10-16 14:48:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17551730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trankvilizator/pseuds/trankvilizator
Summary: The new year comes in and Minho's supposed to become a good guy at last, leave his fuck-ups behind and move on. But then the blond what's-his-face from the bathroom pops into his life.





	1. Escape Performance

 

  
The beginning's at the New Year's Eve get drunk vomit your guts out sort of party of a friend of another friend of one of Minho's friends, quite a distant acquaintance, that is. Technically, he's never been invited, like most of the participants, not a snowball's chance in hell would he recognise the host even if he stood face-to-face with him. It's an old house in the part of the city Minho doesn't know, full of completely unknown to Minho people, but it's the exact occasion on which everyone becomes your best friend if you give it a drink and a hello.

Minho's roving from room to room, looking for someone seemingly worthy the hello over a glass of vodka, a glass of whisky, a glass of martini mixed with mango juice. He tries not to drink too much. It's a new year, new Minho. His first resolution is to stop drinking. He's twenty-six, too old for this shit. At some point in your life you're forced to stop running away from the decisions, stop drowning the problems and thinning them with alcohol until they appear see-through.

So that's the first resolution. He's counting them in his head, again, a rehearsal to see whether or not he actually managed to remember them all on his way to the party. Roving from room to room, he counts and to the guy who's about to pour him another shot, he shakes his head no, thanks, man. His hair gets in the way of his vision, but he can't shake it away from his forehead because the head hurts too much already. He's in search of water now, thin the problems with alcohol, thin the alcohol with water. The second resolution is, focus on your job, you twenty seven year old dumbarse. Which reminds him, all the people around seem to be around twenty, not much more than that, and all of a sudden he feels like the oldest person on the entire planet, like he's about to die. Or it's just the martini, he's mixed it with beer, the beer was coca-cola flavoured.

When he walks into the other room, somehow he constantly walks into other rooms and it's never the same room and his journey has no end. When he walks into it, his body cuts through a cloud of smoke, the smoke mushroom blowing up towards the ceiling. The music's playing so loud it's stopped being music, it's only series of physical punches into Minho's stomach, a distinct thumping going on inside of Minho's head. Walking into the other room, carrying with himself the smoke mushroom that's already blown like a wedding veil, he also walks through his body, trying to specify which part of it in particular hurts the most, from his feet up towards his suddenly very likely brain cancer activated.

The veil tells him he's not married yet. It needs more precision. He isn't going to be. Not married, not coupled, not anything. That's another New Year's Eve resolution, stop being the fuck and leave guy, make some actual effort to find the mythical love of your life. At least a man you could share the rent with, someone that boils the water for your coffee in the morning, someone to snuggle into his arms and say you love him when you're drunk so you don't regret it the next day. Friends don't do that. Friends are married and paired, while he stays exactly the same as he was the year before, and the one before that one.

Another resolution. Find a hobby. The smoke mushroom cloud dissipates as he looks around the room that he's found himself in without fully realising it. There's a piano inside, he's too old for piano, maybe some sport, maybe read some books, maybe about sports or piano. Someone walks towards him like they know each other even though they don't, she tries to give him a drink, or maybe she wants him to hold the drink. He leans in to tell her he's looking for the love of his life, can she wait a second, but she leans in as well and they kiss and she tastes of vodka and cigarettes, just like him, then she disappears.

The journey goes on, he catches himself speak his thoughts out, someone responds to him, a foreign face, through the smoke, I love you too, Minho, and he's surprised because he didn't imagine someone would. He grabs two bottles of water since he has two hands free, the drink that he's been holding about three rooms ago has disappeared somewhere on the way. The lights go blue, violet, green, there's an open window but the air's stagnant and the clouds of smoke stay still until you walk into them and carry them out like balloons. He takes the water and the balloons, his last birthday he fell drunk asleep in his own bathtub. Now it's a new Minho, he's holding three bottles of water. A swift gait, out of the room, into the room, it's a bathroom. He sits on the toilet and starts drinking water, thinning the water, thinning the problems, and there's a guy sitting on the edge of the shower, which is right in front of the toilet, they're looking at each other. He hasn't noticed him first, upon entering. The guy's blond, slim, handsome, a youngster party goer. He says hello and Minho says, give me ten minutes. It's a new me, he promises, it's my best new year coming. The man smiles. It's an hour till midnight, they're alone in the closed bathroom and someone's knocking. Minho starts drinking the water.

 

 

 

  
When he wakes up, he's on a sofa. The blanket slips off his back and drops to the floor as he turns around half sitting and immediately regretting it, lying straight back down. He wants to puke but instead only releases a sound in some aspect similar to death rattle, which isn't left ignored. There's someone else in the room.

"You have a bowl on the floor in case you're gonna vomit."

Then the thought hits him. He's no new Minho. He's hungover, has no knowledge of time and space and no recognition of the voice speaking to him. The last thing he can remember is martinis and smoke and the guy's blond hair. That guy, what's his face.

He moans, again, lifts his hands and rubs his eyes. "Is it new year already?"

"First of January, yes," another voice. Sound of steps. Minho grows worried but also wants to puke and wanting to puke wins over as the only emotion he's capable of.

"Fuck."

"Take the bowl. Just get it out of yourself."

He's pitiful. He keeps his hands on his face, blocking the vision, stopping the reality from getting into his eyes. The world spins and he still doesn't know if he wants to know where he is.

"Are you that blond guy from the party?" he asks in a pitiful, hoarse and moany voice, through his hands and wrists, the only reason for the question being he's too much of a baby to just look, trust his eyes and verify the assumption.

"Yeah, that's me. I'm Taehyun. You're Minho. We had sex last night." The voice stops, then resumes. "Actually that's today. It's noon."

Maybe he would be able to ignore the whole world and just focus on not vomiting and not moving and protecting himself from re-entering planet earth but shit, he needs to drink. Water.

"Taehyun," he starts. Somehow the name sounds natural in his mouth, familiar, so he assumes he must have used it a couple times already. Another fuck he doesn't remember. "Can you get me those water bottles? I had water bottles with me."

A giggle. A bit hoarse too. Minho, existing now only in the world of sounds, his sound and the other man's sound and the steps he heard before as the only signs of human life nearby, he assumes that Taehyun also went through a lot last night.

"I don't have your water. We're not in the same place anymore."

That's when the surprise and the worry and the confusion win over and push Minho's body up, as if it was the sort of armchair that turns into a bed and vice versa squeezing people in comedy films like sandwiches. He opens his eyes and first it's just white. The world is the white around him and he must be blind. Seunghoon always told him, Minho, you moron, don't mix alcohol. He didn't say moron. That's an update. But then there's more. There's a blond man sitting on the sofa opposite to the one Minho's on, legs crossed, elbow against knee. He's looking at Minho and smiling.

"Do you remember yesterday?"

"Guess," Minho tells him to. He gets to learn that his inability to pronounce sounds and push what he hears in his mind off of his tongue comes from the dryness in his mouth. He swallows with difficulty. "That's the god-damn problem." He looks around again and this is not a place he recognises, spreading before his eyes. There's no people. There's no people he knows and no people he doesn't. It's not a hotel room either.

"We spent a couple hours talking in the bathroom. You told me about your New Year's resolutions."

Fuck, he doesn't remember them anymore. "You said you were looking for some prince charming and that this is a special year for you." He's making fun of Minho.

"Why did I tell you that?"

"Why not?"

"Why do you remember it?"

Taehyun shrugs his shoulders. He's wearing an oversized white t-shirt, first three buttons undone, the fabric slipping off his right arm. Minho would find that charming if he didn't need to-- "I drank less than you," Taehyun says.

"I need to drink now."

Taehyun's index finger shows some point beside the sofa. Minho takes a deep breath in and begins the search for water, again, the never ending search for happiness, love and peace. He gets it. The bottle top, he lifts it up and without a moment's hesitation starts drinking. Taehyun only watches as he empties the whole bottle in what may be just a couple seconds or minutes or one eternity that brings Minho closer to death. He's older, he remembers. Now, he's twenty seven. The blond guy must be twenty, like everyone else on the planet.

"Shit."

"You okay?"

"I don't know."

"You seemed really well yesterday. I mean, you were disoriented but I felt like we had a nice conversation going on."

Minho shakes his head. He's a bit embarrassed. Maybe because of the conversation and sex thing that he doesn't remember or because he didn't calculate it correctly and two lasts mouthfuls spill all over his t-shirt.

"Shit. I'm sorry."

"It's fine."

Trying to stop the water from spilling over the blanket and sofa too, he loses control of the bottle and it falls down to the floor and rolls somewhere that might be a faraway land out of reach of Minho's senses.

"I'm a mess. I'm sorry. I gotta go."

That's a single familial thing about the situation. Even if he's with a perfect stranger in a completely unrecognisable to him room god knows where, he can do what he always does and what he's best at. Say he's sorry. Collect his shit, keys and phone. Step three, the last one, disappear. It's not the way it was supposed to be but the new better Minho, the upgraded model that was planned to be released this year, it got cancelled. All we've got is just the old Minho. The guy who hates his job. The guy who broke his friend's heart three years ago, that was also around New Year's Eve. You have those flashbacks of the worst moments of your life in other worst moments of your life. A death spiral.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm fine."

"Do you know where you are?"

"Are you asking me or you want to tell me?" Standing up, he kicks the bowl and the bowl kicks the empty water bottle. Taehyun stands up as well.

"We're at my boyfriend'splace. He drove to pick us up from the party. It was six am. Do you remember any of that?" He's slightly troubled by Minho's lack of any memory of all of this happening.

Minho's legs are shaky and unstable, and he quickly gives up on the idea of dragging his body out of the room. He takes hold of the sofa. "Do I look like I remember?" He sighs loudly. His neurons are waking up, his senses grow sharp in baby steps and there's one thing he's thinking about, among all the flashback film frames from last night. He says, "Please don't tell me he's going punch me in the face. I'm leaving in a second."

"It's okay. He doesn't punch people." Taehyun says the words like he's enjoying them, like it's a joke Minho doesn't recognise because his ability to interpret another human being's emotions and intentions is limited just like his ability to move his limbs without falling flat on his face.

"Tell him that I'm sorry," he sits back down into the sofa and gathers the blanket in his hands from under his bottom.

"That's fine. It happens." Taehyun comes up to Minho's sofa and now they're both working on the blanket. Somewhere in the process, Minho learns that Taehyun's intention is to cover him with the blanket once again. Taehyun's eyes are trimmed red with a sleepless night and black with the smudged eyeliner, and he has two big love bites on his neck, of which Minho can almost be sure he's the author.

 

 

 

  
It's in a cafe that he meets the blond man from the party for the third time, that man who knows something about him that even he himself doesn't. Somehow people who listen to you when you're drunk seem to get your problems better than you do. Like that guy telling a story to Minho, how he saw a dead body during his military service, now it's hunting him in his dreams, or that other guy who got caught by his mother having sex in her bedroom, that hunts him too every time he sleeps with a woman. During those parties, Minho always hopes to be drunk enough not to remember anything but not as drunk as to start telling stories about himself. Knowing the sort of things you're capable of telling strangers when drunk, you're unable to relax. You don't want to get to know that part of yourself.

They're sitting at a two-person table by the window. The blond guy whose name Minho's now reminded of, Taehyun, he's called Minho on his phone to meet. Now, he isn't exactly the same man that Minho remembers from the party, at least from the broken pieces of memories that he has. He's dressed elegantly, in the sort of suit jacket you wear at the office, his hair not messy, his face not as pale as when drunk. Minho really doesn't want to be here.

"So where did you get my phone number from?" he asks, even though he's almost sure of the answer.

"You gave it to me, silly," Taehyun replies, instantenously. He has a square jaw, big ears, but overall soft look to his face. "At Seungyoon's party."

So that's his name. Seungyoon, the party organiser whose existance Minho has never had a chance to acknowlege. Hosts are like the urban legends you hear about, unable to confirm them nor deny. Minho can't confirm nor deny whether Taehyun's lying to him.

"And why are we meeting?" Minho's looking at him and Taehyun's looking at the cafe menu in front of himself, in his mind perhaps choosing the syrup to his latte, wondering about the size of the cup or visualising its looks. Like he's sure Minho's going to stay here and talk to him.

The truth is, Minho's going to stay and talk because he's the old Minho, not the new Minho, he hasn't changed much and can't say no to a stranger he's had sex with. Especially since it doesn't happen often that his one night stands want to talk over coffee, like even they know Minho's not worth the effort.

"Why not?" Taehyun replies. So that's his shtick, his standard response to things, with his dreamy eyes half-closed and lips half-opened. "I have a theory that we get along quite well, like we did at the New Year's Eve, and I want to verify it," he elaborates. His eyebrows move in a specific way - a decision has been made. He stands up, holding the menu in one hand. "What do you drink? It's on me, by the way."

From his seat by the window, Minho watches Taehyun depart, stop before the bar and speak with the barista. His slim figure in the suit jacket and jeans, he places both of his elbows against the counter and puts all of his weight onto it, his back arching. They're perfect strangers, don't know the first or last iota of each other and it's the first time Minho sees Taehyun for real, with a clear mind, full attention, yet somehow, at the back of his head, he knows he's growing irritated. Maybe by being forced to wait. Or maybe by the fact that there's so many words exchanged between Taehyun and the barista. Taehyun's the type to talk to strangers. Smile, be lovely. Ask the barista what he recommends, just for the sake of starting a conversation and getting to know the other person's preference. Minho drums his fingers.

When Taehyun comes back to his seat, Minho immediately asks, "So you want to talk?"

Taehyun nods his head and a few strands of blond hair escape from behind his ear. He has two pierced holes but no earring. "Talking's good for a starter."

Minho ignores. "What do you want to talk about?" He clicks his tongue, and adds, "Since you already know everything about me." Midway through the sentence, he realises that the old Minho is here indeed, the snappy, angry, tired Minho.

But Taehyun doesn't seem bothered. "And it's convenient in a way. It's like starting from the end. I know the bad shit about you, now we can go back to the crusty buttercream icing on top."

When the barista comes up, Taehyun instantly tears his gaze away from Minho, the conversation's terminated. They smile, the barista has brought the coffee for Taehyun only, non-fat double-sweet peppermint latte, says Minho's will take a bit longer to make. When the two of them talk, Minho suddenly remembers.

"Didn't you mention like a boyfriend the other day?" he asks, when the barista's already away.

Taehyun scoops the whipped cream from his mug and proceeds to lick it off his spoon while at the same time looking in Minho's eyes, a behaviour which Minho can't decide how he should feel about. Reaching for another scoop, Taehyun responds with, "He likes you." Then, sensing Minho's reaction, he follows it with, "We're not exclusive, if that's what you want to know."

This is what happens when you try to become a nice guy, Minho thinks to himself, you fuck it all up and attract weirdos just like yourself. He leans against the table in a manner like it's not that big of a deal that they're here drinking coffee and he has a boyfriend at home. To tell the truth, this is as good as it gets. Just someone to talk to.

"Yeah, that's what I wanted to know."

Enter Taehyun the Blond Man from the New Year's party, right into Minho's life. A city is outside of the window they're sitting by, tall, grey, bland, modern buildings of no characteristics, no information about where exactly they are, the same sort you see in every country you go to. One plastic bag rolling down the pavement, cigarette butts left on the windowsill.

"Great." The moment Minho drags his eyes back to Taehyun, Taehyun's mug is already half-emptied. The spoon with which he has been scooping the whipped cream out is now lying on the table, leaving a trace of milk on the surface. "In the bathroom, you've mentioned you have that mug with the logo of where you work at, and you hate it because every day it reminds you of your job but you can't seem to find another mug of the right size to prepare your morning coffee in," Taehyun recites. "But you never mentioned where you work exactly."

It's a weird way to ask, where do you work.

The barista heads for their table, with Minho's black coffee on the tray. This time, Taehyun doesn't look at the man, just looks at Minho. "It's a bank," Minho says, one breath out, together with a sigh.

"And you work there with that married friend of yours?"

Minho can feel a cold breeze run down his spine. It might be the new clients coming in through the front door of the cafe, two tables away from theirs, or because he senses a subject he isn't going to like, coming straight ahead, like an iceberg. And what they say about the icebergs, you see just the tip, but there's much more down there you'll get to know only once you crush into it. "What married friend of mine?" he asks carefully.

Taehyun finishes taking a sip of his mint coffee and explains, "The one who got married three years ago and before the wedding you had sex with his wife-to-be and she confessed to you that she would break up with your friend if only you told her to?"

Minho's first instinctive reaction is to look around, as if he was expecting someone to hear Taehyun's words and assume them to be truth, pop into their conversation right after Mister Taehyun the Blond Man from out of Nowhere popped into his life. The truth is this is all true and Minho can feel the sweat stand on the back of his neck, as he does his best not to show any reaction.

"Why would I tell you that?"

Taehyun shrugs, in a way that makes Minho peeved, like there's something to shrug your shoulders about. "You were drunk. But don't worry, this won't happen again. You quitted drinking as your New Year's resolution, remember?"

He doesn't.

"There's just one more thing I need to know," Taehyun continues, barely looking at Minho and more into his mug of coffee, Minho's mug just a few centimeters away, full because why would he insert more caffeine into his already shaking heart. He doesn't see the way Minho's muscles tense or his jaw tenses along with them. "Because you told her not to do it and I wonder if it's because you didn't love her back."

At least there's one thing Minho's sure about, and the memories didn't blur it in his head, with the mess of all the other terribly made decisions, the short list of people he was almost ready to settle down with and the never ending collection of those he's spent one night with and never saw again. "Because I didn't."

"So why did you say you feel forced to find a relationship so that it doesn't seem like you're still interested in her?"

"I said that?" He grabs the mug with his americano and pours it into his mouth, one big swig, just to have a break for thinking. Then, even after a break for thinking, americano already kicking in, he doesn't have any new thought in there to share, so he just goes, "I'm not used to this sort of conversations with complete strangers."

"Three years isn't enough to forget about her or?"

"I did. But the guy's my friend and we work together--"

"So you do work with the married guy."

There comes a longer pause, which for Minho is awkward and conspicuous, but for Taehyun doesn't seem like much of a bigger deal, his cat eyes following other clients of the cafe as they move around the place to and fro, way to the toilet, way to the door, way with their cakes and coffees on the verge of falling off the plates and saucers. Maybe it's Minho's turn to say something, but he doesn't, doesn't know why he's even there and why he's forced to listen to everything the man tells him. It's the same feeling as when you hear your friends tell you what your parents told them about you. It's always weird to know what people tell about you to other people. It's weird to know what Minho said about Minho to this random guy he slept with.

"Are you provoking me?" that's the best Minho can come up with, the time being Taehyun has already finished drinking his latte and Minho hasn't yet started the americano. "Are you going to blackmail me or what?"

Taehyun raises his eyebrows. "It's called a date. Don't be so serious about yourself."

 

 

 

  
Without knocking, because he never knocks at Minho's office door, Seunghoon comes in with the morning report and catches Minho staring into the space and thinking about things that aren't exactly his job. Seunghoon closes the door behind himself and walks up to the desk.

"Someone at the reception desk spilled the beans that you finally deigned to come to work," he starts, his tone recognisable so that Minho knows what he can get prepared for. "I'm honoured to find you here."

Minho presses his hands onto his swivel chair and pushes himself off the desk, looking to distance himself from his friend, at least physically. "Happy New Year, right?"

"I told them you were sick but at least you could have answered the phone, you arsehole." When Minho stands up from the chair, Seunghoon sits on the edge of his desk like he usually does it, usually talking to Minho from the perspective of up above him, at least some symbolic centimeters. "I get it. One day for the hangover, one day for feeling shitty that you had a hangover. But why the fuck have you been absent for three days straight?"

Suddenly Minho remembers how he could have gone to work the day before but instead of that chose to meet with the stranger from the party, the more than one night stand guy, even though he would prefer to think he didn't want to. Learning things about yourself from others is like that moment when you were a child and your parents were watching a scary film, and told you to cover your eyes with your hands, and yet you still peeked at the screen in between your fingers.

Minho shrugs. "Guess one day wasn't enough for feeling shitty." That's when the psychopath appeared from around the corner, blood, guts, screams.

Seunghoon sighed. "I told you you could have come to spend the night with us."

As Minho nervously steps towards the window, Seunghoon moves his arse on Minho's desk so that he can see him better as he winces and furrows his eyebrows.

"Yeah, me and all you married couples. Way to start a new year."

"You said you were going to stay at home."

"I lied."

"You always are." What Seunghoon means to say is that Minho's twenty-seven and has a habit of crashing the parties of much younger people he doesn't know. First, the point was being surrouned by younger people was a fix to his problem of feeling old. Then feeling old while surrounded by younger people needed a fix too. Minho's life was like a riddled ceiling you keep on patching and new holes come along anyway. "Where were you yesterday's evening? I went to your flat at five pm and your neighbour told me you left."

Around five pm he and Taehyun must have been booking a hotel room, Minho using his bank manager business credit cart for that. He shrugs. "Nowhere."

"Remember what you told me in December?" Seunghoon's playing out the role of Minho's dad that he's never had. Minho's childhood, him forever pushed around from one middle-aged woman to another, one of his mum's friends to another because she never had quite enough time to take care of him. "Your New Year's resolutions?"

Trying to make him feel guilty, another person to do that. As if Minho wasn't good enough at it on his own. Minho sighs again. "Stop with the drinking," he starts, folding his index finger. "Stop crashing people's parties. Stop having sex with strangers."

Seunghoon nods his head after each resolution Minho mentions. He's sitting on Minho's desk, his arms crossed on his chest, white shirt, black tie, hair slicked back. "And?"

Minho says he doesn't remember anyway. He wants to say, wish happy new year to Chungha, your pretty wife, but then stops himself. He takes the report Seunghoon has put on his desk.

 

 

 

  
When they meet again, this time at a different cafe as if to bluff the non-existent adversary following them, Taehyun tells a story about how Minho's father left him when he was young, and how he was brought up by a collection of his mum's friends from work and from the bridge club, going from home to home almost on a daily basis, those middle-aged women, single or married but definitely childless. In every house a different set of rules, so many mums but not a strong enough bond with any of them.

"You said you are wondering," Taehyun tells him over his bubble gum macchiato, meaning Minho's drunk monologue in the bathroom, "if this isn't the reason why now you can't seem to settle down with one person." He sips the bubble gum macciato coloured blue through a straw, making a loud slurping noise. He's wearing an over-sized second-hand jumper and a pair of glasses with transparent frames. "You said maybe it's because you're lacking a good example from your childhood to follow."

Other day, they're in a fast food bar and sucking in the noodles, Taehyun tells Minho a story about Minho's first true love from university who broke up with him because he didn't care enough about her.

"You said," Taehyun narrates, "that it seemed to you like one Minho wasn't enought to satisfy her. And that this was the beginning to a longer series of unfortunate relationships. Until you finally stopped looking for any, that is."

Every day a different place and a sequel to the series of Minho's life fuck-ups, narrated by someone else rather than Minho himself. And then they wind up at Minho's place and no matter how tired or irritated Minho is hearing the stories about himself told by himself and passed on to himself by Taehyun, when Taehyun gets naked, things make sense again. For a moment, Minho remembers that being a shit person with low self-esteem doesn't mean you can't climax.

They're doing it on Minho's living room sofa and Taehyun's sitting on his dick while at the same time looking around the room and making comments. Taehyun, his mind always somewhere off. Sweaty blond hair, skinny body, sickly pale skin. And the way he's so noisy during sex but the next moment so blase.

He remembers everything from the New Year's Eve babble Minho did to the point Minho doubts he drank anything at all that night, not even champagne at midnight. Every meeting it's a different story about Minho told from the perspective of another him, and it's like a therapeutic session only with a therapist you can also have sex with to reach the katharsis.

And then one night when they're lying on the carpet in the corridor and Minho doesn't know how he'll clean the carpet afterwards, he goes, "Tell me something about yourself."

Taehyun giggles from somewhere out of Mino's vision. He moves his head to the other side to see Taehyun's face, blond hair in eyes, looking up at the ceiling with a smile. "Something like what?"

The thing about Taehyun is nothing seems quite serious when he speaks of it. Which is a good thing but maybe not always.

"What's the deal with you and your boyfriend?"

Taehyun's boyfriend whose name Minho hasn't been told yet, he has something in common with all the party hosts and the mythical idea of family relations to Minho.

"He's a great guy, seriously." Taehyun sits up so his head goes out of Minho's vision and now from the perspective of the floor he sees Taehyun's back moving, the shoulder blades, the spine, the buttocks. He has a tattoo around the bottom side of his back, but seeing it upside down Minho can't tell what it shows.

"Why are you together?" What Minho's implying is why are you together if you sleep with me. He could ask the same question Seunghoon's wife. Why are you with him after we had sex that night before the wedding. The worst story that isn't even that complex as Minho likes to think of it in his head.

"I always wanted someone that I could rely on. But I also want to keep on meeting weird guys."

"I'm the weird guy, right?"

Taehyun giggles again. He suddenly appears right before Minho and kisses him on his chest.

"And Haesol really wants me to stay but knows it's complicated." Minho repeats the name in his head, like he expects it won't be used too often. "You know how you go on a date with a guy met online. And one of you starts off immediately with his sex preferences. So I was the guy who jumped straight into sex and he was the guy who was looking for a life partner."

"You don't seem like a life long partner."

"Why can't you have both?" Taehyun moves his finger down Mino's abdomen which is still sweaty, the outline of some piss poor muscles he's tried to work on for months now, for the new Minho, new gym cart equals new Minho. More like working your arse off to get rid off the anger. "Why can't I have him home and you here?"

Mino wants to say, he doesn't have him, they're just screwing once or twice a week and talking about his life fuck ups, of which the list is long but one day will be finished.

"You've said it's his flat, not yours. Are you like a sugar boy then?"

Another giggle. Taehyun's disappeared from around Minho's stomach, now he's reaching for his t-shirt and underwear. Minho knows his next destination is Minho's kitchen and a quick mug of after sex coffee. Third coffee today, not that Minho's counting.

"He doesn't pay me for keeping him company, if that's what you're implying." Taehyun's steps lead to the kitchen. Minho watches him still from the floor. "Don't get jealous, Minho. It always gets me turned on when you guys get jealous of him."

From the floor in his own flat, from the dirty carpet covered with semen, watching Taehyun's little feet waltz to the fridge to take out milk and to the counter to pick the coffee, a silver bracelet around his ankle, Minho knows his last fuck up will be falling in love with the blond guy from the New Year's Eve, and it makes his eyebrows furrow.

 

 

 

  
A thing happens on the blue Monday, still in January, that's the lunar eclipse day, the most depressing day of the year they say, Minho supposes because it's enough time from New Year's Eve to make you realise your New Year's resolutions aren't going to be fulfilled, no new you, no changes. Minho's aren't, in any case. By the blue Monday Taehyun's already told him most of the stories, three weeks of fucking and taking about Minho's past.

Taehyun's already told a story about Minho's receding hairline and his fear of losing hair completely, as they sat over steaming coffee, like telling fairytales to a kid.

Taehyun's told a story about Minho's crashing the parties to feel like he's still twenty, weightess like he felt during university, trying to blend in with the crowds of youngsters who are too drunk to guess Minho's real age and that he has his own office in a company.

As they go to Taehyun's place, Taehyun still sucking on a blended caramel latte, the sky looks like the two wells in the paint palette where your light blue mixes with light pink. Or maybe the apocalyptic landscape in a film where Minho's one of the extras running away from the problem, from some sort of a natural disaster he doesn't recognise yet. Humanity will not survive, is the conclusion of the film, twenty seven is now the maximum life span for a human being. Above that, in between the bland modern buildings nobody likes and nobody wants because Minho doesn't want them, hangs the big red sun, half dipped into the winter clouds. It's cold and from between Minho's chapped lips escape the white bubbles of hot air. He keeps moistening the lips and they keep getting drier, until Taehyun opens the door. It's a flat in one of the modern blocks, the place Minho vaguely remembers from three weeks ago.

Taehyun walks up the staircase, with his red hands holding the iced coffee and Minho following him two steps behind, and every couple of steps he stops to say something or point at Minho, and continuing to talk to Minho, walks for a moment backwards, like a distracted teenager, for a moment losing the direction. He has clouded glasses but doesn't seem bother. He has a white mark on the arm of his black coat from leaning against the wall but doesn't bother either.

He says, "It all started because I told Haesol I want to party at the New Year's Eve. I said, let's go somewhere, have fun, get drunk, kiss to the fireworks, but you know how he is." Minho doesn't. It might be the second time he hears the man mentioned, but he nods nevertheless. "He said he would rather stay home, but I can go alone, find a party to crash. You know, the way you do it. I said, why would I go without you."

Minho nods his head. He doesn't have much to say but he wants Taehyun to continue so he goes, "And how did he convince you?"

Taehyun smiles to himself, a memory popping up to his head, then explains it to Minho, "Kisses and sex, and then I was convinced."

"Right."

"But then during the party, there was no one to party with. It's weird how sometimes the bigger the crowd the less people you can actually interact with, you know what I mean?" It's the fifth floor they stop at, and Minho knows there's a lift they could have taken but didn't. Taehyun gives him the iced coffee. "Hold it," he says, looking for the keys in his skin tight blue jeans. "So that's why I was in the bathroom when we met. I was thinking, damn, I should have stayed with him. And then you came along."

"That's what happened?" Taehyun takes the plastic cup of coffee, and then Minho's hand, and leads him inside. The door closes with a loud bang, another loud noise is Taehyun throwing the keys on top of an antique foyer table. You always know where Taehyun is because he always makes so much noise.

"You were drunk, explaining your resolutions. I like when guys start from being honest, you know. Even if it's because they're drunk." Taehyun throws off the coat on a stool instead of hanging it. "And then I knew I had someone to start the new year with."

Meanwhile, to himself, Minho thinks, you usually don't meet the right people if you have sex with them in a house crowded with party people and you can't even remember if you used a condom. Just when he's thinking that, Taehyun presses a kiss to his lips, and Minho's arms instinctively reach to wrap around the man's waist. For a moment they stand kissing, leaning against the door, and the flat around them smells of melted wax, like frosty gingerbreads or a cranberry pie with cinnamon. As it's usually the case, Taehyun's the one to get impatient, his hands find their way to Minho's belt, undoing it, unzipping, sliding the hand in, no longer cold like the iced coffee. And still Minho reacts like he does feel a cold touch on his junk.

Behind Taehyun, in the floor-to-ceiling mirror where he sees himself and sees Taehyun, he suddenly spots a shadow moving down the shiny brown floor boards.

Up until now Taehyun's boyfriend remained in the imaginary world, as opposed to reality, an urban legend like party hosts or Minho's father, someone Minho couldn't fully believe in, no matter what Taehyun said on the subject. And then, following his own shadow with slow, wary steps, the legend merges into the same world that is populated by Taehyun and him, and all the parties to crash. Things change in one second. Santa isn't real, Taehyun's boyfriend is.

They stop kissing. While keeping his right hand in Minho's pants, the left one on Minho's neck, Taehyun leads his eyes to where Minho's looking at. Now both of them are looking at the man, and the man is looking back at them. Not exactly the situation Minho has hoped to find himself in and, as for the man, not exactly who he has imagined worried about the consequences of screwing a taken guy.

A skinny, barefoot silhouette clad in a pair of grey sweats and a long cardigan sweater with its buttons undone. Light brown hair, in strands falling over the left side of his forehead, big glasses finishing off the picture. He points at Minho with the empty mug he's holding, possibly in the middle of carrying it to the kitchen, and says, "You could send me a message that you're coming over." There's no indignation nor surprise to his words.

In response, Taehyun's hand finally gets out of Minho's pants. "Funny that you're saying that," Taehyun says, "Because I knew I could but I thought if it happens that you're home, if the destiny chooses that you're home, an unexpected meeting would be fun. To introduce you two."

Minho clears his throat then. Standing with his trousers unzipped and his winter jacket on, he lifts one hand and says, "Hi. I'm Minho."

That's when the man takes a good look at him, leaning against the nearby wall in a half-relaxed pose, and half as if he was the one in the wrong place, wrong time, and not the other way around. "Yeah. You slept on our couch. Of course I rememeber you."

"Sorry about that, again." Minho's lips curve into an awkward, feigned smile, the one Minho usually uses in his work environment, during meetings with executives and co-workers he deep down can't even look at anymore. There's no unfriendliness from the man's side, a noticeable detail, but it's not necessarily the most anticipated meeting for neither of them. "And sorry for intruding here. Didn't know you were home," he hears himself say, quite nicely fitting into the weird situation and clearly blaming Taehyun without saying it aloud.

"It's fine."

Only then Minho remembers again about Taehyun's presence, seconds before Taehyun comes up to the man and kisses him on his cheek. That also happens to be the same micro-second Minho remembers about his trousers and begins to zip them up. "I think I should go."

The reaction is instant, and it's not Taehyun this time around, it's the man. "Don't be ridiculous." He lets out a single laugh, as if an attempt to convince Minho how little bothered he is, a new sound that Minho registers and repeats in his head. "Give me a few minutes. I'll get changed, grab a book and go to the cafe. Don't want you to feel weird that I'm around."

Taehyun leans against the mirror, the straw from the frosty blended caramel latte back between his lips, watching the situation develop.

Minho clears his throat for the second time. "I think it would be more weird if you left because of me."

The man looks at Taehyun. "Did you talk to him?"

Taehyun shrugs, continues to sip on the latte.

A throaty noise. "Ten minutes, guys, and I'm gone. It was nice to meet you and all that, and in case I spoiled things, pretty sure there's viagra in the kitchen cabinet on the left."

 

 

 

  
It happens a few times more that he meets Haesol, never more than a few sentences exchanged each time, most of which are meaningless phrases like "hi" and "how you doing", so when Taehyun asks, "What do you think of him?", there isn't much for Minho to say.

He goes, "We didn't talk much," and Taehyun rolls his eyes. Minho prefers when it's Taehyun rolling his eyes towards a waiter who forgets about Minho's order or when it's in reaction to Minho's story about his annoying boss, annoying co-worker, annoying family member. Not necessarily when it's directed towards Minho himself.

This time, Taehyun has an earring in the pierced hole of his right ear, two bracelets around his left wrist. In the dim light of a single bulb hanging over their table for two, Taehyun's freckles appear darker, the wrinkles on his nose more visible as he's thinking how to lead the conversation the right path. "I don't mean it in the deep way. I mean it like," he stops, choosing the right words, as if he suddenly began to care about something among all the lack of care about everything in the emtire world. "Is he any close to your type? That's what I'm saying."

Then, silently, Taehyun puts a piece of cake into his mouth, this little thing he does to indicate now it's Minho's turn to talk - putting things into his mouth. Like eating popcorn when you watch a film. The film is Minho has to respond, he can't be the extra this time around, can't run away.

He clears his throat. The realisation comes to him that he's never thought of the man this way, the idea has never crossed his mind if Haesol's his type, because it never seemed to matter. He asks for clarification, "You mean, if I find him attractive?"

"Exactly."

He retrieves the memories. Haesol saying "hi" in the hall, not shaking Minho's hand, keeping himself in a distance, a suit on, looking smart arse, going places, Minho can't know where and why and it doesn't matter, the longer he's away the better, Minho's fucking his boyfriend. Eyes looking over the glasses, long fingers clasped on his crossed arms, hunched back, always leaning against something, as if he couldn't just stand in the middle of any place, like if he stood in the full light of a room, with no furniture to prop his body, he would magically disappear swallowed by the ground and only a pile of his clothes would be left lying on the floor. Looking at Minho over the glasses and asking questions without asking them, trying to figure out if Minho's an arsehole, moving his jaw, lowering his eyebrows.

Taehyun clarifies, "As in, if you met him in a club would you hook up with him?"

The silence grows and Taehyun's expecting an answer, and Minho doesn't know what the expected answer is. He says, "You know I wouldn't meet him in a club."

Taehyun giggles. "Yeah, you're right. He doesn't go clubbing like we do."

"Why are you asking?"

"I thought maybe we could go on a date," Taehyun says then, point-blank, baldly, straight to the point. "With him, I mean."

"With Haesol?"

"Yeah that's what I'm saying, you dummy."

And Minho knows that the dummy in Taehyun's mouth is like a pet name. "Why?"

He knows Taehyun's gonna say, "Why not?" He always does that when it's important and when Minho thinks serious about it. He realises it's been weeks now, almost two months, and he's learnt about Taehyun quite a lot, as opposed to their first date in the cafe. "I've been meeting you so often recently," Taehyun says, like he can read Minho's thoughts, "and we're having a good time talking. I thought maybe he would like to have a good time with us."

Minho makes an, "Uhm," and Taehyun quickly shakes his head.

"I don't mean sex," he updates. "It doesn't have to be sex. I mean it more romantically."

Minho catches a glance of the waiter passing by their table, and the thought grows in his head, what if someone hears them talk.

Taehyun decides to elaborate, Minho can see it in his eyes and his eyebrows seconds before he actually opens his mouth, two thin, pale-pink lips, growing redder and fuller during kisses and when sucking on plastic straws. And other things. All the little things Taehyun likes to do in bed.

Now that Minho hasn't said no, he's back to perfect calm, cutting off another piece of his matcha cheese cake. "The last guy we dated," he starts, "really pressured Haesol to get more involved in our sex life. I mean, it really bothered him that we don't have sex as three all the time. Haesol just isn't like this you know." Minho doesn't ask, like what. He moves his hands around the table, as if to pick up his glass of water, but then changing his mind with his fingers already on the spot. "Plus when he moved in to our flat for a while, he really couldn't keep things clean. We broke up pretty quickly." Taehyun smiles at the memory, although in a bit gloomy way. "Some other guy we dated just the whole time badgered me to break up with Haesol behind his back. Now I'm trying to be more careful about it all."

Then Minho remembers that it's been a couple of times now that Seunghoon, aka Minho's only available replacement of a father, has asked him whether he's dating someone, if he's began to see someone since the new year started. First couple of times, Minho said, no, he wasn't dating anyone because he definitely wasn't dating Taehyun because that definitely wasn't an option. Until now.

Change of scene. Jump to Minho's other piece of social life that isn't strangers and alcohol.

Every time he meets with Seunghoon, every time he comes with a visit and she's there, it happens. Seunghoon can leave just for a moment, disappear behind the doorframe for a split of a second, a flicker of an eyelid, and the awkward silence happens, during which Mino's sure they're both thinking of the same thing. About what happened three years ago, how they had sex in hers and Seunghoon's bedroom, right in the middle of planning Minho's speech for the wedding. I'm so happy for you, my best friend, that you found the love of your life. Next thing you know, they're screwing. Next thing you know, she tells him, after the climax, lying on the bed and tucking Minho's sweaty hair behind his ear, back when he used to have thick hair, worth noting they definitely didn't use a condom, "Just say one thing and I won't marry him." And Minho doesn't know what to do because he really doesn't love her.

In those silences that they share, Chungha always seems to be asking the same questions, always taking them both on a trip to the past, only through her eyes, soundlessly. Why did you do it. Why didn't you agree. Why did you tell Seunghoon about it all. Because he did like friends do it, tell each other things, that is.

And then comes back Seunghoon, walks into the sitting room with a bottle of wine or the dinner plates, and it's just a moment, brief as one breath, that the painful silence expands and becomes shared between the three of them. They all know. They're all thinking of it.

Until someone starts talking. It's Seunghoon this time around. "So, Minho," he says, in his cheerful voice of Minho's substitude dad, "Did you meet someone this year?" He says, "You seem to be seeing someone."

Minho, first, takes a sip of his coffee, like it's a normal thing to do when you're asked a question - instantly get your mouth busy doing something that isn't responding. What Seunghoon's asking about is, do you have someone, someone that isn't my wife. Because even though Minho has never been in love with Chungha, they just all assume that's what happened.

"Yeah, there's a guy I've met," he finally says.

And it seems like both of them, Seunghoon and Chungha, breathe a sigh of relief.

Suddenly Minho remembers that dating Taehyun who's dating Haesol isn't exactly that far away from having sex with your best friend's wife. Maybe all we do in our lives is just repeat the same mistake, no learning involved. Maybe Taehyun's right. Maybe he does that because he's been conditioned to do it. Always in someone else's homes, in the middle of someone else's relations, like he used to be when his mum dropped him off at a house of her bridge best friend. Here's Minho, let him merge into your family for a while, play house together. Minho, that's your bedroom for the next two days, that's your temporary mummy, number thirty something.

Jump back to the restaurant, under the small light bulb hanging over their heads. He isn't looking Taehyun directly in the eyes as he says, "It's the first time I'm in a situation like this."

Taehyun giggles, like it's amusing to him in a cute way. "Every guy we asked on a date said the same thing." Taehyun's hand reaches across the table to cup Minho's hand, squeeze it reassuringly. "It's okay if you don't want it. What we have as two of us is perfectly satisfying to me."

Minho thinks, it's not for me. Aloud, he says, "Can you give me some time to think?"

Taehyun smiles at him, his thumb caressing Minho's palm, then he takes his hand back. He says, "Of course." He says, "Think of it as a normal date. You'll get to know him a little, you'll talk. If it turns out the thing's not here, that's fine, no hard feelings."

 

 

 

  
Taehyun's talking takes most of their evening together, talking about Haesol and Minho equally, as if playing the role of a translator for two men who don't have a common language. He's sitting by Haesol's side but keeps looking at Minho. While looking at Minho, he places his hand on Haesol's thigh. Minho likes to think it's a successful attempt at keeping a balance.

Haesol reminds Minho of Seunghoon who reminds him of his non-existent father, all three of them looking at Minho from wherever they are in the same judging way Haesol now looks at him across the table. It's not the brief, petting glance Taehyun gives to people and things around him, with the same amount of curiosity as indifference.

It's only when Taehyun leaves the room for a moment, and as he leaves, Haesol follows him with his eyes, his head moving and his neck craning, that Minho finds the balls to start a conversation between just the two of them. He says, "So you told him to go to the New Year's party alone?" It's supposed to be a random subject, like he's picked out one of many, but the moment he pronounces the words, he realises it may just as well be an accusation from his side.

Haesol swirls the pink wine in his glass. With his elbow and his arm propped on the table, he leans a bit closer to Minho. His full lips part but there's no sound. He considers Minho's question, and in the meantime, Minho can count three veins on the man's forehead, two moles on his neck, one long swallow which moves his Adam's apple up and down. "I feel awkward at big social gatherings," he confesses at last.

That's just like Minho, only Minho knows how to thin the awkwardness with alcohol, alcohol as the best social facilitator. Thinking of it, he grabs his glass and finishes all of its content in one gulp, letting his mind wander off again. "Relationships are pretty difficult for just two people. Must be a challenge for three.

"Taehyun likes challenges."

"What about you?"

Haesol's stare comes from over his big glasses and through his light brown fringe. "Let me tell you we wouldn't be sitting here now if I didn't agree to it." Establishing that he's the one in charge the most direct way. He picks up the wine bottle and politely pours Minho another glass. "You're quite attractive when you're not vomiting on my couch."

"Thanks." And so he takes another mouthful of wine. In the left bottom corner of Haesol's glasses, he can see himself reflected twice and reduced in size, wearing his operational risk manager suit, ready to pick up calls and manage risks.

"We're not going to know each other too well after one evening, but I trust Taehyun's judgment," the man says. "He doesn't ask me to meet every man he sleeps with."

Minho feigns a laugh which says, I'm honored. "About that," he starts, "can you elaborate what's the deal you two've got?"

"He can sleep with the men he wants to and doesn't have to ask for permission."

"What about you?" It's an impression he has that the man has stopped blinking his eyelids altogether, just piercing Minho with his stare.

"I don't want to."

"Right. You're not that kind of guy, I get it." He's still peeking at the two miniature versions of himself in Haesol's glasses, checking his looks as if in a mirror. "But it's still weird, right?"

"You can get used to the weird things about someone you care about." A thought crosses Minho's mind that the meeting may serve the purpose of keeping up to date with his boyfriend's interests, give his stamp of final approval that Taehyun likes for him to feel like he has. And yet somehow, Minho doesn't find it all that weird, even if he says so.

"Whatever floats your boat," he says, and really means it.

"It must also float yours. I see no other reason why you'd be here now. We're all here because we want to."

And Minho knows the man's right. All eyes on him, Minho's stepping into someone else's territory and walking around without marking his way back out. He never does.

When Taehyun reenters the scene, waltzing into the room with a salad plate, Minho can see there's a warm light back in Haesol's eyes. Taehyun joins Minho's reflection in each lense of the man's glasses.

 

 

 

  
Even though they now have sex with Haesol present at home, they never do it with him. What Minho has to keep reminding himself is that the man can join them any time he wants and in any way he finds appropriate, but chooses not to. It's not Minho's fault.

But he's been dating Haesol for a month now, at least in some obscure meaning of the word. The way they talk is like a guided practice performed in the controlled environment of Taehyun being right next to them, throwing a new topic each time the conversation seems to be dying off, quickly resuscitating and bringing it back to life. Haesol appears to enjoy Taehyun being in charge of the discussions anyway. He's a weird combination of shy and confident, confidently expressing his shyness.

One evening they meet in the corridor of Haeol's flat. Haesol's dressed casually, as he often likes to be, in a bathrobe and sweats. On the other side of the hall there's Minho in his winter coat and hiking boots, holding in his hands the newly received key.

Minho's smiling as he says, "Decided to make use of it for the first time and come with a surprise." He makes a move with his hands. "Suprise."

As Minho proceeds to remove his coat, shaking it off his back like a cat shaking off the unwanted hand, Haesol says, "You've surprised me indeed."

Only upon further studying Haesol's figure, Minho notices that it seems like the man's about to go to sleep and what he's carrying might be the melissa he likes to drink in the evening. He's looking at Minho with expectancy, frozen into the spot where he was standing the moment his and Minho's eyes met, as if it was Minho who immobilised him, caught him off-guard.

Not yet hanging the coat, Minho asks, "So where's Taehyun?"

Haesol's lips are hidden behind the mug he's holding with his both hands. "It's a Friday evening. He's left to some party."

And the words make Minho wince. Taehyun's not here, it's only Haesol. More than that, Taehyun's gone to a party and he usually goes to parties with Minho. They go to parties where all the people around are twenty like Taehyun himself, where they drink alcohol bought by other people and give each other blowjobs in bathroom stalls. It's no longer a miserable thing to do when he does it with Taehyun, that's what he's learnt.

Now, all he can bring himself to say is just, "He didn't tell me about it," almost succeeding in hiding his disappointment.

"There's some guy he wanted to hook up with," Haesol responds, "That's why he went alone."

That's the reason, of course. Minho's now standing in the corridor of Haesol's flat with Haesol alone, boots still on, coat in his arms, not knowing what to do next. If he should turn on his heel and leave, or if he's supposed to wait for Haesol's request for him to leave. The scene hasn't been yet practised and Minho doesn't have an instruction on what to do. Haesol's eyebrows seem to be suggesting he's not the most welcome addition.

"Doesn't it suck?" Minho says then, in a joking voice, to prevent the upcoming silence. But it's not even close to being funny. He learns that he loves being the new person, not the one put aside, placed on the back burner. The feeling he's had in the cafe, first date, Taehyun speaking to the waiter, now it's back here and it's much stronger.

"What exactly?" Haesol asks, like he doesn't know what Minho means.

"That he's with someone else."

"I'm fine with it. Plus I see I've got you here instead." Haesol pauses, his voice losing some of its previous confidence, but only a little. "Because you're going to stay, right?"

Minho hesitates. "Right, sure."

Haesol shoves one of his hands to the pocket of his bathrobe, his pose relaxing. "We can watch a film," he promptly suggests. "I've got some wine left too."

 

 

 

  
So the next time they do go to a club together, he and Taehyun, Minho can't stop himself from thinking of it all. Maybe Taehyun's thinking of it too, maybe he's thinking how better it is to now come to a club with Minho of all people, to kiss with him in the middle of the crowd and then buy them drinks, but probably not.

They're sitting at the bar when Minho asks, "So who's the guy you hooked up with last week?"

Drops of sweat shine on Taehyun's forehead, gluing together some strands of his blond hair now violet in the bright lights, sweat from all the dancing he's done around Minho. He's still breathing fast but manages to swallow all of his pomegranade vodka drink in one go, smiling at the barman to get his attention and ask for another one. Only then, he turns on his swivel bar stool towards Minho.

"We've met online," he says, simple as that.

"You meet guys online?"

"Just for hook-ups," Taehyun explains, but his thoughts seem to be focused on the barman as he keeps gazing in his direction. "It's convenient. Going through their dick pics, then asking for a meeting. You know how it is. You do it too, right?"

There's many ways in which they are similar, Minho admits that. The very habit of getting drunk at parties and hitting on attractive people to secure a late night fuck, sometimes with a possible morning round two, that's what brought them together in the first place. But now, it just seems like Taehyun's more confident to flirt with drunk people when he has Minho covering his arse. And Minho doesn't look for fucks when he's sober.

When Minho doesn't respond, Taehyun diverts his gaze from the barman and looks at him with amusement in his eyes. "Did you get jealous again?"

Minho gives it a thought. "I guess I am."

The words earn a giggle from Taehyun's mouth. Now fully losing his interest in the barman, Taehyun leans in towards Minho, until his lips touch Minho's earlobe. He says, "What about a rough fuck in a bathroom stall? You can show me how angry it gets you when I screw those guys met online."

And that's got Minho somewhere he's never been to, as he moves away a little in order to see Taehyun's face. Part of him feels intrigued, no purpose denying. "Did you want me to get angry?"

"Now I do. I would fuck someone else just to make you even angrier." Taehyun closes the distance by kissing Minho's neck, then licking it with his tongue. The barman places Taehyun's drink in front of them but Taehyun doesn't notice it.

With Taehyun sucking at his neck, Minho asks, "What about Haesol? Do you do that with him too?"

"Do what?"

With Taehyun now placing his hand on Minho's crotch, Minho asks, "Do you play like this? Does it get him off when you're cheating?"

Wrong words. In one second, Taehyun's hand disappears. "What do you call cheating?" The man is now sitting bolt upright, looking Minho in the face, his eyebrows furrowed.

"You with all those guys. It's messed up." Only when the words leave his mouth, Minho realises what he's been thinking all this time now.

"Friendly reminder, Minho, you're screwing dudes left and right, every night when you get yourself drunk into stupor on your own wish. You screwed me in the bathroom and you wouldn't even fucking remember it if I didn't tell you."

Minho can feel the blood speeding up in his veins. He tightens the grip around his glass. "At least I don't have a boyfriend left at home."

Just as seconds ago he looked relaxed and blissfully tipsy, now Taehyun is back to alert, his eyes shining with the eagerness to prove Minho wrong and his ears are red with the insult Minho's thrown at him. "Don't come at me with this bullshit. What? Did it hurt your fragile ego to stay at home for once?"

A tide of bitterness rises in Minho's chest, followed by a flicker of panic, too weak to stop him from saying, "You're a slut."

Taehyun gives a hollow laugh, his face breaking into a grimace, eyes narrowing into cat-like slits. "Let me explain it again. What I've got with Haesol is an open relationship and we meet with whoever we want."

"You meet with whoever you want."

"I meet with whoever I want." Taehyun drinks the whole of his pomegranate vodka drink and puts the glass on the bar with a loud clink. "Don't make a victim out of yourself again. You fucking knew it."

"Make a victim--?"

"You knew what's the deal from the very beginning. If you've always thought that it's such a disgraceful idea why did you agree to date us?" He doesn't allow Minho to respond yet. The moment Minho opens his mouth, he continues, "Maybe you just purposely make shitty decisions so that later you can feel bad about yourself, like you always do. Like it's part of a bigger problem, your fucking destiny to screw things up." Minho closes his mouth. "I'm so sorry that you screwed your best friend's fiancee. Now, get over it. Grow some balls."

The music keeps playing, and Taehyun's hair switches from green to blue, his necklece shining between the folds of his unbuttoned shirt. Also between the folds of his shirt, his chest rising and falling with his quickened breaths. He's not looking at Minho, perhaps not looking at anything at all, eyes unfocused at somewhere on the surface of the bar. A longer moment passes, with it the rest of a loud trap remix. Minho doesn't know what to say, and it feels like he's never been this empty inside his whole life.

"I'm sorry," Taehyun mumbles. "I just really don't want you to keep thinking about all the bad things."

"We should stop meeting," comes Minho's response.

Taehyun's shocked stiff for a second. He's thinking quickly, Minho can tell by the way his eyebrows are moving and his eyes flickering. "Wait, give me a moment." The look of panic washes over his whole body, as he keeps thinking. "Is it about Haesol? Do you want me to break up with Haesol?"

Suddenly, Minho's back in the old emotions, in the well-known loop he's visited enough times before to know how it all ends. It's just a short story. Like five days before the wedding, everything planned, the colour of the flowers chosen, guests invited, Minho's the best man and he's going to make a speech. And then they have sex and she says, say one word and I'll break up with Seunghoon. Minho's never been good at managing the risks, neither the optional nor all the necessary ones.

He lifts his glass of vodka and drinks all of it, the best method is to thin the problems, thin them with alcohol, thin them a little bit more.

He tells the barman, "One more. Same thing."

He's too old for this shit, the never ending search for happiness, love and peace.

"You have to tell me," Taehyun's voice. "Is this the problem? What did he tell you?"

Another drink, Minho empties it in one gulp. Taehyun's saying something more as Minho reaches to his pocket to bring out the money. He stands up and feels Taehyun's grip on his arm. How to get through this night, move on somewhere else. Tomorrow he'll be hungover again, he'll skip work, Seunghoon's going to call him over the phone as he'll be lying in bed feeling like shit, that is, feeling like normal. Through the vivid, eyeball-melting lights, in between the green one and the pink one, he sees his way out.

 


	2. Seashore by a Coffee Table Lamp

 

The story starts with a close-up on Haesol's face, his black hair in particular, on one side of his head sticking out, on the other flat as if he's just been woken up and sat up in his bed. But he isn't in a bedroom.

As the camera zooms out, cigarette smoke enters the frame, adding a blurry quality to the overall view. There's a cigarette held between the man's index and middle fingers, then his elbow is seen propped against a coffee table, defining the setting as a dimly lit cafe. When the view grows into a medium close-up, there's also an armchair to be spot, which he's sitting on, and a Caspar David Friedrich reproduction hanging on the wall next to his head, and an empty seat beside his seat, almost like he's alone except there are two cups of coffee on the table, foretelling someone else's upcoming arrival. Into the wide shot enters the rest of the cafe's clientele, silhouettes also smoking, little clouds hovering above each table, further blurring the landscape made up by antique lamps with scalloped shades, dark flowery wallpapers and ceiling-high bookshelves. And there's music in the background, someone playing on the piano, it surfaces out of the initial white noise, adding just the right amount of Weltschmerz to the soundtrack of the scene.

The first impression is that Haesol's looking at something intensively, his eyebrows furrowed, his lips pursed and the ashes collecting at the end of his cigarette which he's long forgotten to tip off. It seems like he's deep in thought, calculating an urgent issue in his mind, but maybe he isn't. Maybe he's wondering why he's there, why he isn't asleep, why his hair looks so stupid, uncombed and not even patted down. Maybe he's like those figures in the 19th century German romanticism, usually seen from behind, located in the landscapes that reflect their inner lives, the confusion and despair, and the constant struggle between the humans and the unforgiving nature. But you can never know just from looking.

Enter the woman with hair dyed bluish grey, holding a leatherette bag with fringes. It's the fringes that move before Haesol's eyes and bring him back to the present moment, present place, making him realise the person he's been waiting for has arrived. Time speeds up back to normal.

Dahye says, "Oh, how stupid your hair looks." She sits down on the armchair and immediately leans over the coffee table, her right hand reaching for the man's head, eager to pat the hair on the one side. "You couldn't even get it combed, that's how much you cared about this meeting." As she's leaning over the table, she pushes her coffee cup towards the other coffee cup, both coffee cups clinking. Haesol stops them from being pushed to the edge and falling.

"You called me in the middle of my work," he protests, supposedly, but still allows the woman to arrange his hair. The ashes drop from the tip of his cigarette in the meantime.

"Spare me the bullshit," she cuts in, before he can elaborate on what the work exactly was and how bad it is that he's been prevented from doing it right in this second. "You were sitting in your bed and stinking. That's what you were in the middle of. I knew I had to call you or else you wouldn't move your arse at all."

Haesol gives her a condescending look, the one typical for friends that know each other for too long to control their facial expression and the things that they say. She responds with a nasty gaze. They stare at one another for the next couple moments.

"Tell me it was important that I come here."

"Breaking up with Jeonyul sounds important enough?"

The frown on Haesol's face evolves, now more worried than offended, something Dahye certainly can read having years of practice looking at Haesol's face. His voice is careful when he asks, "Didn't she break up with you two weeks ago?"

Dahye shrugs her shoulders. For a moment she can't respond because her lips are clamped around the cigarette while she's searching for the lighter in her bottomless bag. Haesol turns out to be quicker. He lights up a match and brings it to the cigarette, and only after taking the first puff, a long one, does she speak up again, "Two weeks ago the game was still on and I had more moves to make. But now it's over. She took the cat and gave me back the spare key."

For a moment the three of them sit motionless, Dahye, Haesol and the faceless guy contemplating the sea in the Friendrich painting hanging between them. Two plumes of smoke rise above their table. The piano keeps on playing in the background but the pianist, the blond man Haesol's been looking at for some time now before Dahye's arrival, fails to capture the right emotion and the music grows inappropriately light-hearted.

"So you've really lost?" Haesol asks.

Dahye isn't the type to feel sorry about herself, that's what Haesol knows about her, so she just waves her hand like it's not that big of a deal that she's now living alone and the girl she's loved is gone. "Back to the old shit," she says, her voice now more hoarse with the smoke in her throat. "I'm single, you're single. We're both single again. That's why I wanted to meet."

"Need some tips on how to be single from a professional?"

Dahye chuckles, but with a gloom in her eyes which is very 19th century Romanticism. "That's right, baby. I wanted to feel better about myself looking at you." Haesol makes the move with his hands like, ta-dah, that's me. After another pause accompanied by the inappropriately happy piano music, Dahye announces, "We're past thirty now."

"It's good to have someone to remind me about the fact from time to time and it usually happens to be you."

"You know I was crazy about Jeonyul, right?"

"I know."

"Remember how during the second year of university I said, if we end up old and single, we should just get married?"

Haesol stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray, waiting for the continuation that doesn't come. "I also remember you were drunk and joking."

"Maybe that was an actually great plan."

The guy contemplating the sea keeps contemplating the sea, the blond pianist stops playing the piano and some people, maybe three or four in total, clap their hands in musical appreciation. Someone else shushes them off. A while passes and then both Dahye and Haesol chuckle, Haesol while stirring his luke warm coffee with a spoon. "You really don't want to beg her to come back again, right?"

Dahye sighs. "You still haven't talked to that pianist. You look at him every evening he's here."

Haesol brings his index finger to his half-smiling lips. He puts the spoon on his saucer. "You were right. I was in bed when you called me."

 

 

 

 

The second scene begins with the exact same shot widening in the exact same sequence: from Haesol's messy hair to his face blurred by the smoke, further to the lit cigarette between his two fingers and to his slumped pose on the armchair. The 19th century German Romanticism guy keeps on pondering over the meaning of life and death over Haesol's shoulder, and maybe this whole image is supposed to evoke a sense of inertia and monotony, or maybe it isn't. There's no music being played on the piano, instead only people speaking and the radio host speaking along.

What brings Haesol out of thoughts and into the reality this time around is a new silhouette coming in, walking before Haesol's eyes, no leatheratte bag with fringes and no bluish grey hair. Instead, there's a blond man who stops by the table, a cup of coffee in his hand which he then proceeds to place near Haesol's empty one, spilling some of the coffee down to the saucer. The blond guy Haesol's been watching play the piano for a good few weeks now, he drops onto the seat next to Haesol's, immediately crossing his long, slim legs at the knee and saying, "Waitress told me that some, quotation, middle-aged music admirer in glasses bought me a coffee. I assume that's you she was referring to."

For a moment Haesol doesn't say a word and it may seem like he's purposely ignoring the man and the unwanted conversation he's initated, and not like he's nervous and doesn't know what to say. "That's me. But I didn't tell her to tell you that."

The blond man smiles and his smile is just like the music from underneath his fingertips, and Haesol feels ridiculously breathless upon seeing it. The man says, "I know." He continues, "But I'm a curious guy and I insisted so much she had no other option but to tell me. I can be very persuasive when I have to, you know."

Haesol nods his head like it's some useful fact that's been shared and not a joking comment that doesn't necessarily have a lot in common with reality. He watches the blond man lift the coffee cup and while he's doing so two drops of coffee fall onto the table, ignored. He takes a sip, frowns, puts the coffee cup down. He reaches for the sugar bowl and proceeds to add three teaspoons in. One, two, three. Stirring the sugar into the coffee, he says, "So what's the meaning behind it?"

"Thank you for bringing music to this place."

"So you like it."

"Undeniably."

The blond man pretends to be calculating something on his fingers. "Now I have five fans total. Only I don't know if I can count Mr Lee." He leans towards Haesol, his both elbows now against the table, and with a move of his head indicates an old man smoking two tables away from theirs. "The guy in the corner. That's what I call him but don't ask me about his real name." He shrugs his shoulders theatrically. "He always claps but I'm pretty sure he's deaf."

Haesol looks at the old man and then back at the blond man beside him, definitely young, much younger than Mr Lee and Haesol as well. "Mr Lee?" he repeats with some amusement to it.

"He looks like a Mr Lee, wouldn't you say?" A brief pause. "And you're Mr what? What do I call you?"

"Kim. Kim Haesol."

"Taehyun." He lifts a hand for Haesol to shake it, his body hovering over their table, throwing shade onto the two cups of coffee. "Charming to meet you, Mr Kim."

Taehyun's handshake is strong, fingers wrapping around Haesol's, a bit like he's attempting to make him stand up.

"Seems like you know some usual suspects coming here."

"I have an eye for people," Taehyun says, in the voice of someone revealing an objective truth about himself. "For example, I know you always come here with that woman with blue hair. Your girlfriend perhaps?"

Haesol shakes his head. "Just a friend."

"I thought so." He picks up his cup and proceeds to drink its content, letting Haesol silently watch him do so from an arm length's distance, like he knows Haesol won't dare interrupt his drinking with words. There's something to the way Taehyun speaks and acts that makes it feel less like a real-life conversation and more like a performance Haesol's participating in willy-nilly, as that one guy randomly chosen from the audience. Haesol has sure never bought coffee to a man like him.

Another head of ashes collects on the tip of his cigarette and so he puts it into the ashtray, too distracted now to divide his attention between smoking and looking at the man.

Only once Taehyun finishes drinking does Haesol ask, "Are you going to play tonight as well?" a question he's been figuring out for a couple minutes.

Taehyun waves his hand dismissively. "Let's put our cards on the table, shall we?" Haesol blinks his eyes over his glasses, which have long ago slid down to the edge of his nose. Taehyun continues, "I have this theory, I've come up with it just today, because of the coffee, that you've had the hots for me for some time now, but the longer you've waited the more difficult it got to talk to me. That's why you're staring at me every evening I'm here but we've never exchanged a word." He smiles. "Until today, that is."

The precision of the man's words renders Haesol speechless for just the right amount of time to think the situation through and choose the reply closest to truth. "Was it really so obvious?"

Taehyun's smile widens, the dim light of the nearby lamp highlighting his jawline and the bone structure of his cheeks. He's visibly satisfied by being right and Haesol's satisfied letting him know he's right. "You're not denying it. I appreciate that," Taehyun says. Then, the expression reappears on his face, which Haesol can tell is curiosity. "So why didn't you buy me the coffee earlier?"

Taehyun's confidence to ask questions must constitute part of the man's overall charm. It's not intimidating, rather the opposite. It makes Haesol want to be more open, honest, at least with himself. "I guess I'm not the kind of guy to make the first move," he explains, with a slight shrug. When Taehyun looks at him expectantly, he clarifies, "I'm shy," and it's a serious voice that doesn't quite match the message.

"I can already tell you you've made the right decision."

And so at the end of the evening they'll end up in Haesol's bedroom, on Taehyun's request, and Haesol's going to realise he's never had sex like this before in the thirty years of his life. Afterwards, Taehyun's slim, pale silhouette will walk out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, naked, and come back to the bedroom with something to drink, also naked. And while lying in bed, chin in hand, and scrolling with his eyes from Taehyun's feet up to his face, Haesol will learn his greatest wish now is to have someone like Taehyun be in his flat seven days per week. He's waited so long for this moment to happen.

 

 

 

 

The first two weeks, they don't have one serious conversation on who they are to each other and what they intend for their relationship to be. Haesol comes to the cafe and watches Taehyun play the piano, and after each performance Taehyun joins him at the table, asking for a cigarette but always paying for his coffee. Then, they leave together and have sex at Haesol's place.

"I'm not into guys buying me things," Taehyun explains one time, when the topic of coffee and splitting the bill comes up. He edges forward on his seat to hold the cigarette in the flame of Haesol's lighter. "I have a job and I'm not looking for anything close to a sugar daddy."

Haesol shoves the packet of cigarettes back into his chequered jacket and then watches Taehyun take the first two drags. The music from the loudspeakers is French jazz today, and two tables away from their table there's hanging a reproduction of a Toulous-Lautrec poster, an old guy kissing a woman in a red dress at an official dinner table. Mr Lee sits behind an open newspaper so you can't see his face.

It's a little game Haesol's playing, trying to cut what he sees into the shape of a painting, four straight lines locking Taehyun inside an invisible potrait, like the ones hanging on the walls of the cafe. Taehyun drinking coffee, Taehyun moving his lips, Taehyun letting out a moan.

"It's been too many times a guy proposed that to me," Taehyun says, back in the present moment, "assuming I'm in need of quick money just because I haven't graduated university yet."

"And are you planning to graduate?"

Taehyun picks up his sweetened coffee and proceeds to sip on it, which is the signal he's not going to answer the question, at least not yet. Haesol nods his head. They have those little fights in which Haesol tries all the questions he can come up with and Taehyun only sends smiles in response. With Taehyun, even after five meetings it seems like Haesol knows about him just as little as during their first conversation ever.

"So maybe what's your job?" he tries again.

Taehyun opens his mouth, smoke pluming out from between his lips, just like from his nostrils, about to say something but then stopping. "I'm not gonna tell you either," he decides with a smile, another one of those, his left eye covered by the blond fringe that he hasn't tried to tuck behind his ear the whole evening and Haesol really wishes to do it for him. Both being asked questions and not answering them gives him a kick, Haesol can tell. It seems like it's the main purpose of having a conversation with Haesol to begin with.

"Is it something weird then?"

"It's the opposite. It's run-off-the-mill and I don't want you to think of it when you're thinking of me." He continues drinking. Taehyun drinking, Taehyun looking around, Taehyun looking at Haesol straight in the eyes.

What seems like half an hour later, Taehyun's coffee is already finished and he leans in towards Haesol, words at the tip of his tongue ready to be spilt out. Taehyun's pupils are big and shiny with excitement, and Haesol can see himself in both of them, perhaps the way Taehyun can see himself in Haesol's glasses.

"I have another theory about you," Taehyun announces, like he does it every now and then, ever since their conversation moved one step away from the weather, music and coffee, the holy trinity of small talks Haesol knows because he always does them on every date he's ever gone to.

He makes a low murmur to let Taehyun continue.

"My theory is I'm twenty and you're really getting off on our age difference. Second thing is, I have to control what I say about myself, because you're also getting off on not knowing me." Haesol frowns a little, but as Taehyun continues, he can't think of it too much yet. "I'm guessing now but I think all the other men you've had sex with before, you knew them too damn well and that's what made the sex boring. You always had to make sure you knew their name, address, profession, all of this. I think this is the kind of guy you are."

Now, Haesol rolls his bottom lip between his teeth, thinking.

"Say if I'm right," Taehyun asks.

"Maybe you're right."

And the way Taehyun smiles at it, proud and satified, with the dim light of the cafe coming from the left to the inside of the portrait of Taehyun smiling, it makes Haesol want for everything Taehyun says to be true. So he can say that it is, nod along. When the waitress comes by, she nudges with her head the lamp hanging from the ceiling and it swings a little and the light swings too, over Taehyun, on and off his face, making it seem like a weird police interrogation, another scene they're playing.

"I can give you the best blowjob of your life if you just stop asking me what I do for a living."

"That's the deal?"

Only then, he can see Taehyun's eyes have grown darker, like he knows they do when Taehyun's turned on, like they did when Taehyun was between his legs, just two days ago, licking at him while staring straight into his eyes, such a lewd way Haesol has always assumed it required practice.

"I just want to be that guy who plays the piano for you and sucks your dick, that's the deal. We go to your flat and you don't say anything, only what you want me to do to you. How is that for a plan?"

It makes Haesol pause and forget about his cigarette, about the coffee and the potrait he's been holding with his eyes, because the moment he agrees, he'll realise that maybe having a conversation with Taehyun after sex, washing Taehyun's hair in the shower and watching him pour milk into the coffee is just as good as the sex itself. But if all of it starts with sex, Haesol will let it be this way.

Lying back in the stack of pillows on Haesol's bed and staring up at the ceiling, Taehyun will tell him other things, out of nowhere, sequences of unconnected thoughts murmured out in a single stream of thought, which Haesol will have to actively make sense out of and put together on his own. Haesol will admire him speak and run his fingers through Taehyun's hair, finally allowed to do so, and he'll wonder how to make it all last longer.

 

 

 

 

So a couple meetings later, as they're lying in bed and the window's throwing a pink and orange sunrise pattern onto the sheets they're under, Haesol has his chin on Taehyun's shoulder. Taehyun smoking, Taehyun purring, Taehyun about whom Haesol has no idea who he is. Playing piano, sucking Haesol's fingers. Taehyun mentioning other men, on purpose, smiling slyly when it's time to reveal new pieces of truth. But because he knows he hasn't been so sure about anything in a long time, into the blond man's ear, Haesol says, "I think I want a relationship."

Taehyun stays motionless for the first couple of seconds, trying to keep it cool and then failing when it turns out he has to take the cigarette from his mouth and let out a series of coughs. Haesol sits up, watching the man's reaction unfold. The cigarette ashes fall onto the bed sheets, making a black hole by the pink sunrise leaves, and Haesol pretends he hasn't noticed.

"I know that story and, spoiler, it doesn't end well," Taehyun says, supposedly confident as usual but somehow coming across almost like a stubborn child. "You've been staring at me in the cafe for so long you've created a completely false image of me in your head. You've been feeding it all of our meetings till now."

From the perspective of chin in hand, elbow on the bed, Haesol says, "What sort of an image?"

"Of someone you want me to be but I'm not. I know how this works." He kicks the sheets off of himself and leaves the bed, like he's suddenly remembered he has to be somewhere else now, at six am in the morning, even though Haesol knows he doesn't. He remembers Taehyun's working hours, even if not knowing where Taehyun works.

For a moment Haesol speaks to Taehyun's pale, round buttocks. "It's you who didn't want us to talk."

"I did it for the sake of the amazing sex we had." Taehyun kneels to pick up his underwear and for a moment Haesol watches him struggle putting it on.

"So you're saying you wouldn't be as flexible in bed if I knew your plans for the future or where you grew up?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying."

"Me getting to know your better is a turn-off for me, or is it for you?"

Taehyun throws him a sharp glance over his shoulder.

Haesol continues regardless, "What I'm trying to say is, maybe you don't want to admit being wrong. This one time. Because from what I can tell, it's you who wants to keep it anonymous between us. Not me." Taehyun sniggers, and just then Haesol notices that it's a new behaviour from the man. As he's pulling his tight blue jeans up his legs, the cigarette wiggling in the left corner of his mouth, Haesol can see he's nervous. "So now you'll just leave?"

"I really wanted to avoid situations like this." As if to prove Haesol wrong, now he slows down and sits on the bed, his one hand on its way to fix his blond hair, something he doesn't usually do because usually he doesn't care. Haesol's eyes are on the level of Taehyun's stomach so he sits up to make it more serious. The cold morning air in the bedroom rises goosebumps on his skin, as he tries to lock their eyes together.

"It's five in the morning," he points out.

"I can't stay at your place forever."

"You can. That's what I'm saying. You can stay at my place and we can see each other for longer than what it takes you to drink your morning coffee."

Taehyun doesn't want him to elaborate. He shakes his head, and so this time Haesol trails off obediently. The focal point of the scene is Taehyun in his tight, blue jeans, sitting on the edge of Haesol's bed, amorous but whimsical.

After a pause for reconsidering the situation, Taehyun goes, "We have to keep it one hundred."

"I've just said I want you to become my boyfriend. I'm listening to your one hundred now."

"I'm twenty," he starts. "I like clubbing and having sex. I spend nights drinking and waking up places I don't know. I like doing things on my own and not having to report it all to anyone. We're just really different, you know?" Haesol says he knows and Taehyun speaks on, carrying conviction in his tone, now even more determined to prove his point, "I don't know where you got this idea from that we could have a relationship. I'm not looking for a prince charming."

"We've been meeting for a month now, maybe that's where."

A pause. Taehyun looks at him over his shoulder, through half-closed eyes, his thin eyebrows dropping down into a grimace. The last month has been moments of time bunched up together without any particular cause and effect quality to them, not leading from certain points to others. And between those moments, the two of them kissing. And despite it all seeming so elusive and vague, Haesol has come to a decision and is waiting for Taehyun's final move.

Taehyun takes a breath in, and says, "I haven't been meeting with you exclusively."

The light makeup on Taehyun's face is smudged, only emphasising the dark circles around his eyes from the sleepless night. The redness is creeping up his neck and ears, in a strong contrast with the light blond of his hair. There's a sharp trail of his spine showing, and as the sunrise outside renders most of his body pastel colours, he's more of a rococo painting than a real-life person in this particular point in time, like the Fragonard reproduction at the entrance to the cafe, the most delicate thing Haesol has ever brushed his fingers against.

If he's testing Haesol's reaction, Haesol realises it with a delay.

"What if I don't mind it?" he asks, carefully, and turns out he's asking both Taehyun and himself.

 

 

 

 

It's over one year later.

Walking into the flat, Dahye has her hair coloured pink and Haesol knows the point is to keep her looking eighteen forever. A seafoam-green fur, high heels, black leather trousers. Part of Dahye's charm is whenever you see her you feel like time has come to a halt long ago. Days and months passing by, things just don't seem to change between them.

First thing she asks about is, "Taehyun's home?" That's the usual routine, Haesol's got used to it by now. Whenever Taehyun's somewhere around the flat, Dahye acts slightly different, pays more attention to what she says and how she says it. If Taehyun's out, she's in. "Finally some time just for the two of us. I think that's exactly what I needed today." Haesol pretends he doesn't see the ill-disguised relief on her face. "Did you dye your hair?"

Closing the front door behind her, Haesol runs one hand through the hair, like checking if it's still there, still caramel blond. "How is it?"

"Surprisingly good. I always thought it's just me trying to stop the aging, but here we go. You're looking as young as ever." Taking off her fur, she still seems to be gazing around the place, as if nevertheless expecting to spot Taehyun hiding somewhere in the corner. Thinking of Taehyun, the amusement slowly escapes her expression. "It's his idea, right?"

Haesol nods his head, what can he do. Dahye nods as well, and now they're both nodding as they come into the living room. The subject ends there. Haesol brings the glasses and opens the bottle of wine Dahye has brought with herself, cheap and sweet, their favourite kind which they've spent many evenings drinking in the past. It's the same wine they drank one night during the first academic year, kissing to figure out if there was hope for the two of them together. Didn't work out.

Now, with the wine in the glass, the glass in her hand, bracelets shining on her wrists, Dahye begins talking about her love affairs. They always start from Dahye. If you don't let her speak the moment she wants to speak, she might just never mention the thing again. "Three weeks of dating and only now I've learned she has a kid," Dahye reveals, the tide of bitteness washing over her face with the words. Haeson thinks there are many similarities to be drawn between her and Taehyun, both physically and personality-wise. Sometimes he thinks that's the reason the two don't click together.

His elbows on the table, both hands holding the wine, he says, "Three weeks of hiding is some big effort on her part. Seems like she was really worried about your reaction."

"And she must have been right about it." Dahye always so open about her emotions, that's what reminds Haesol of Taehyun. It's hard to keep up with someone who has so much to say and never really gives in. "One date, we're driving back home and I'm pretty convinced we'll have a nice round in bed, icecream waiting in the freezer, and then she says, we have to pop in somewhere for a second. I say sure. We get there and turns out it's a kindergarten."

Haesol makes an ouch sound.

"I don't know why but just the second I saw her with that kid, I felt like there was a gulf dividing us." She quickly downs the glass and pours herself another one. "Even though we're just three years apart, this experience alone made her seem to be from a completely different world than mine. One moment, puff, all the sexual attraction gone."

"Is is still gone?"

"I don't really know. She keeps calling me since Friday and I'm trying not to think of it. I need to give myself a break."

Haesol reaches to the bowl of sweets standing on the table. Sweets always present at home, all the sour watermelon pops, caramel corn jelly beans and cotton candy chewing gums, it's something that came to his flat together with Taehyun, as a package. Now he finds the wrappers everywhere Taehyun goes. He finds the wrappers in the washing machine after the clothes are washed. "And when has taking a break ever helped you make a decision?"

"I'm just shit scared to tell her the kid changes everything between us. Because I think it does." Somehow automatically, her hand follows Haesol's, and she also brings out a sweet. "Does it make me a bad person?" she asks, fidgeting with the wrapper for a moment, before putting the content into her mouth. Haesol recognises it's a sassy banana sphere, Taehyun's latest new addition.

Another couple of minutes later, the subject out of the way and Dahye having no interest in further discussing it, she switches to, "So how's you and Taehyun?"

Of course.

Haesol does the thing Taehyun's usually best at. He chews on the gummy worm, considering whether he should bother his friend with the latest updates on his relationship, or let it slide. She has her own problems which Haesol would rather help her with, instead of bringing Taehyun into the conversation. She's leaning on the table and chewing on a gummy worm as well, and with the fierce expression on her face, Haesol knows she would know sooner or later.

"We're dating someone," he begins, coming back to the wine bottle. Dahye makes the face that says she doesn't really understand. "What I mean is, I think we're going poly."

The following silence is a long one. Dahye freezes with her hand in the bowl with Taehyun's sweets, her eyes looking at nothing and only her eyebrows revealing the emotions going on inside of her. Finally, she goes, "That's Taehyun's idea too?"

Haesol nods his head. It's difficult to talk about Taehyun while knowing Dahye doesn't like him one bit. She didn't like him upon first meeting, saying he totally wasn't Haesol's type. She only had more reasons not to like him when she learned about their open relationship and Taehyun sleeping with other men. Now this, Haesol's sure, this won't change her opinion for the better.

But he sees the way she's trying to play it out cool, at least for the start. She hides the grimace behind her glass of wine as she asks, "So what's the guy's name, I guess?"

It seems to be the first question that's popped to her mind, but Haesol replies nevertheless, a bit amused, "Jaewook. They've met each other in a club."

"In a club."

"He's twenty nine. Executive manager."

He doesn't manage to continue as Dahye cuts through his words, "Alright, I tried." She puts down her glass. The grimace is now visible and right there, before Haesol's eyes. "I don't know what to say."

"You could say, congratulations on finding a second boyfriend." He proceeds to pour himself another glass, then theatrically lifts it as if for a toast. He wants to make her smile, make it a bit less serious that she's forcing it to be.

"Do you even know how ridiculous this sounds coming from you?"

"They started meeting some time ago and then Taehyn decided to introduce us to each other. I think that's sweet."

Dahye's eyebrows stay furrowed. "And you allowed all of this to happen?"

"It's not about allowing and forbidding. We're two grown-up men."

She makes the face that says, sadly, Taehyun doesn't act like one. Haesol can't decide if it's a good thing or a bad thing that he's not bothered much.

"Falling in love with one person doesn't necessarily mean falling out of love with the other."

Now with this Dahye isn't going to agree. Haesol sees it on her face, in the corners of her plum-violet lips and in her eyelids made-up pastel-pink and fluttering. "That's exactly what it means. What are you doing, Kim Haesol?"

"Dahye."

"Like I don't have enough problems in my own life, I come here and this is what I get." All the stress that's accumulated in her over the last couple of days, add to it the passionate resentment she feels towards Taehyun. When the two are put together, that's how she's acting. "I've always said this guy's going to break your heart, and now I'm more certain of it than ever."

"He's just being honest with me. What else do you expect from him?"

"I expect him to grow the fuck up," she snaps. "He's over twenty now and just the other day we were picking him up drunk from a club. What is this? Are you his dad?"

Haesol leans against the back of his chair, his fingers tapping against the table. Dahye finishes the next glass of his wine, putting it down with a clink.

"I know what you're thinking. You're thinking one day he's going to stop with all this, all the drinking and fucking. And maybe you're thinking if you open your relationship to some other guy now, then it'll make it all come quicker. But people don't change just because you secretly hope they will."

Haesol doesn't reply. Dahye's phone lights up again, lying on top of the table, and Haesol can see the woman's name showing on the screen, which sounds more Chinese than Korean. Dahye ignores it. With her neck stretched to one side, as if to avoid seeing Haesol sitting right in front of her, she looks at the rest of the flat now and continues sipping on the wine. The little silent treatment that used to work when they argued about things that didn't matter as much Taehyun matters now.

By the time she turns back towards Haesol, the woman calls Dahye one, two, three times. The phone goes black, and Dahye says, "Alright. I'm sorry. Do whatever you want." Her voice stubborn and definitely unapologetic.

"You know I will."

"Only promise me when the shit hits the fan, you'll admit I was right all along."

 

 

 

 

Maybe the first mistake Haesol makes is not taking Minho seriously enough.

By the time Minho comes into the picture, he's already the fourth or fifth man Taehyun introduces to their relationship, calling it polyamorous as oppose to just a weekend fuck guy, and all the initial seriousness Haesol has had about the situation is no longer there. At this point, what he considers Minho is just a temporary addition. He's the handsome, caramel-skinned guy with whom Taehyun has spontaneously fallen in love with and who pops in every now and then to fuck Taehyun and leave his stinky cologne in their bed sheets. He's the guy Haesol sees naked and with his dick out, drinking out of a water bottle in their kitchen while Taehyun's taking a shower.

Since the previous guys barely lasted one month each, moving out as soon as they got invited to move in, for Haesol there seems to be no point in getting invested. No point feeling emotional towards Minho and, in consequence, no point having sex with him. But he's an eye candy, Haesol can give him that. Hearing them have sex right after stepping into the flat is a pleasant welcome just because he can tell how damn much his boyfriend's enjoying it.

The part where Taehyun's begging him to go deeper, use those big arms and pull him even closer, that's when Haesol puts the shopping bags onto the foyer table and takes off his coat. When they change the position and Taehyun dares him to look him straight in the eye with his big dick inside, that's when Haesol goes into the kitchen. It takes some effort not to get turned on hearing Taehyun have the sex of his life, noisy as he likes it the best and just two rooms away, but Haesol usually manages. He intensively thinks about the dinner he's about to make. He thinks about Dahye. Or his boss. Things that are far away or exactly the opposite of sexy.

Few minutes later, as he's putting the stuff into the fridge, Minho comes into the kitchen to throw the condom to the rubbish bin for plastic. They've started recycling with Taehyun around a year ago. Not sure where the condoms go, though.

"Hi there," he says, with that deeper and rougher voice he always has minutes after an orgasm. When Haesol looks over his shoulder, the man's standing a couple steps away, his dick out just as expected. Both he and Taehyun seem to enjoy walking naked around the flat. "What's for the dinner?"

After sex, he's in a good mood, more talkative and less whiny than on other occasions. From all of Taehyun's stories, Haesol knows the guy's a troublemaker. His biggest speciality fucking taken people.

When Haesol shares the menu for the night, Minho makes the distance shorter. He comes to the fridge and they're standing inches apart. "That's a nice little jacket you're wearing," he says, taking out the cold water bottle from the first shelf, like he usually does. "Very red."

Haesol thanks for the compliment, knowing that as soon as the endorphins drop, Minho will be back to his usual self. His usual self is a guy who doesn't talk much to Haesol, let alone comment on Haesol's looks.

He empties half of the bottle in one gulp. "So you really don't mind us having sex here?"

"Where else are you supposed to have sex?"

Minho makes the cheeky face with a smirk. "You're underestimating us."

"I really don't think so." One of the advantages of Minho, or so Haesol likes to tell himself, is that he assists Taehyun in his regular late night escapades. When Taehyun's not alone and there's Minho looking after him in all those shady clubs and bars, Haesol can sleep at nights again. He's never felt as well-rested as recently.

Another advantage is, Minho seems to have his sex drive on a similar level to Taehyun's and Taehyun hasn't slept with anyone else but him for the last few weeks. Haesol wishes it could stay this way, but knowing Taehyun any night may just as well be Minho's last one here. It's not that he's actively waiting for Minho to leave. He just can't get emotionally invested if he's not sure of Taehyun's intentions. And if he can't have his emotions towards Minho pinpointed down and held in place, there's a constant struggle inside of him.

Minho catches Haesol let his gaze absentmindedly slip down between Minho's legs, and smiles at it. He takes it as a compliment.

So instead, Haesol has to perform all the necessary baby steps around Minho, seeing how much Taehyun allows, at what pace, and just going with it.

 

 

 

 

The next step is when they're sitting by the table and they've just finished eating. Haesol's the one to announce the news. "We've got something for you," he tells Minho. He puts the spare key onto the table and pushes it towards Minho, manoeuvring between the wine glasses. Minho makes their fingers brush as he takes the gift. It's subtle but electrifying, and Haesol looks at Taehyun immediately as it happens.

Taehyun goes, "We've decided it'll be easier to spend time together if you can just come in and leave whenever you want."

Only last Saturday was the first time they slept together in one bed. The sound of two other people breathing beside Haesol. He couldn't stop listening at first, but then it was the safest he's ever felt falling asleep.

Minho goes, "I don't know what to say," and he's his usual self, slightly furrowing but with his lips uncontrollably curving into a smile. He doesn't know how to act around the two of them, just as Haesol doesn't.

"You don't have to say anything."

"I think I have to."

"All you have to is say yes." Taehyun leans in for a kiss and that's what he gets from Minho. There's something to the way Minho holds Taehyun's chin, doing it delicately but firmly at the same time, that gives Haesol a feeling warm in his chest. He just doesn't know if he should cling to it or let it go.

 

 

 

 

They have a conversation in the evening, while doing the dishes. Minho and his spare key are gone for reasons connected to work, some sort of documents that the man still needs to fill for his supervisor. There's a silence in the flat, wax scented autumn leaves melting in the warmer.

The rule is when Haesol prepares the food, Taehyun's the one to clean it all up afterwards. He's standing by the sink with a pensive expression on his face, wearing an oversized, flower pattern shirt and yellow rubber gloves to it. Haesol gives it a guess, "Theorising again, aren't you?"

He wants to open a discussion and this seems like the right moment to do so. The red sleeves of his jacket rolled up at the elbows, Haesol carefully puts the remaining pieces of cake on a plate and brings them to the fridge. Kneeling down, he squeezes it between other packages and containers, and that's when Taehyun goes, "My theory is you don't like Minho at all and you just don't want to let me know about it." He looks at Haesol and then adds, "He told me you never talk to him when you're alone."

"I'm getting used to him."

"I never saw the two of you kiss."

"Same reason." Haesol stands up, crosses his arms and props his bottom against the kitchen counter.

"It's different than with Jaewook and Seonghwa. You weren't so reluctant to spend time with them, from what I remember," Taehyun observes, placing another plate on the dish rack, like he doesn't yet want to make the conversation seem too serious and this way scare Haesol away. He's always playing a three dimensional chess, assuming he's one or two steps ahead of Haesol. "I think there's a reason you're not trying to get used to him." He makes his voice softer, "You can tell me about it."

Haesol sighs and crosses his legs as well, his whole body now occupying much less space in total, having compressed itself into a yet smaller size than usual. "But you have some guesses of your own, don't you?"

The moment he says the words, Taehyun starts with the first one, "Is it because of the stories I told you about him?" He turns off the water tap and rests his both gloved hands on the sink. He's the exact opposite of what Haesol feels like in the current moment. "Maybe it does sound like he's an arsehole but I know he just needs someone to understand and accept him."

Taehyun on his mission to help someone the same way Haesol helped him. The two of them playing yet another foster home for a twenty-seven-year-old guy.

"It's just as much your choice as it's mine," Haesol says.

"That's exactly why we're talking now."

Haesol pauses, fixes the glass on his nose. Unlike usual, Taehyun gives him the time and doesn't jump to the next guesses right ahead.

"Remember when I fixed you the job so you could get back to piano?" Taehyun teaching six-year-olds at the private school of one of Haesol's friends. Another painting in the collection. "You told me you hate when someone acts like they know what's best for you."

"I remember."

"Just because something takes more time for me than for you doesn't mean we should stop doing it."

"You really think so?"

"I do."

Taehyun takes the gloves off, one by one, struggling a little with the left one, then comes up to Haesol. His steps are in slowmotion, like he's hovering inches over the floor. His hands climb up to Haesol's cheeks and then he presses a kiss onto Haesol's lips.

"I feel like it's really working out this time," Taehyun whispers between their open mouths, with a warm, tickling breath. There are faint freckles underlining his eyes. His lips get gradually redder between the kisses, Haesol takes a glance at them every time they stop for a breath, like a series of snapshots taken out of focus or a series of impressionist paintings of the same subject painted at different times of the day, since morning till the sunset. Exploring the play of the orange light against Taehyun's cheeks and neck, conjured out of a bunch of soft brushstrokes with the dabs of a red flush wending up Taehyun's neck. "Promise me you'll tell me if you ever feel like you don't want to be part of it."

Haesol nods.

In just a moment, they'll stumble into the bedroom and Taehyun will let Haesol place him on top of the fresh bed sheets. They'll undress looking at each other, slowly. Then, Haesol will kiss the path down Taehyun's shaved crotch and while taking him into his mouth, he'll listen to the continuation of Taehyun's faltering whispers.

"I want you to suck him off just like this. I want to show him you're so good at it, Kim Haesol."

 

 

 

 

But weeks pass and nothing changes about Haesol and Minho, and then one day Haesol comes back home to hear about a guy Taehyun's met online. He's been using the app again, that's what Haesol realises belatedly. "He's booked a hotel room," Taehyun announces, crossing the corridor on his way to the kitchen, his bare feet leaving temporary prints on the dark floorboards. Taehyun's voice from the kitchen continues, "For this Friday, after the party, that is. I'll have the exact address and his phone number for you, just in case."

There's also cigarette smoke. The white ribbons curl and twirl out of the room when Haesol comes in, saying, "That's great," the right moment to see the way Tahyun's lips smile around the cigarette. Haesol giving his stamp of approval is part of the process Haesol has almost forgotten about. He's thought Minho has taken the burden of it on himself.

 

 

 

 

Friday happens to be the same day Minho decides to come with a surprise visit.

Hearing the key move in the door lock, Haesol's first reaction is a fleeting hope of Taehyun changing his plans, giving up on the hotel room sex, joining Haesol in the lazy late night TV watching and allowing him to calmly fall asleep on his shoulder. He comes to the corridor but then it's Minho he sees standing before the door.

A full-body shot: slim, tall, black-haired like a crow and wearing his winter coat. The man's excited, but then the excitement's gone when Haesol makes the announcement, "There's some guy he wanted to hook up with."

Minho's reaction unfolds gradually, like in the first seconds he doesn't want Haesol to see him disappointed or hurt, but then can't hold it inside. His eyebrows grow furrowed, as Haesol likes to imagine he always has them, always furrowing and looking sharply from under his long, dark eyelashes, and then they grow even more furrowed than normally.

Fast-forward. The moment Haesol asks Minho to stay, he realises there's an audible desperation in his voice. It's not just about preventing Minho from leaving in this state, angry at Taehyun and possibly at Haesol too. It's about Haesol and about the fact he doesn't want to be left alone this particular night. He's got out of the habit, he's anxious. If there was ever going to be an opportunity for the two of them to talk one on one, this is it.

Haesol says, "I've got some wine too." Like it really matters and Minho cares about it.

"It's fine," Minho goes. "I can stay."

The action moves on to the living room where Haesol has his nest made of blankets, sheets and pillows ready on the sofa, TV as the only source of light enshrouding the whole room in an eerie shade of blue out of the car chase sequence where three police cars go after a red sports car. Minho sits on the far left edge of the sofa, his legs apart, elbows on knees and hands clasped together. With the way he's hunched and looking at the screen it seems like Haesol's the one coming in and catching him watch the film. He realises then, Minho just isn't that often at their place. He doesn't know the way Minho does simple things such as watching TV.

"What's going on there?" Minho asks, a question to fill in the blank.

"From what I could gather, the guy in the red car kidnapped a billionaire's daughter," he explains, bringing in the wine and two glasses. Minho takes one of them. There's the strained air in the room as Haesol sits on the other side of the sofa, and now that the TV screen shines in front of his eyes he can barely see Minho's silhouette beside him. In the TV screen, someone starts shooting and there are dead bodies falling to the ground. "You were right saying it's difficult. Just for two people, let alone three."

Minho grunts something that may pretend to be a reply, but really isn't. Then he points at the screen. "That's the sort of films you like watching?"

"There's nothing else to choose from and I can't really fall asleep when Taehyun's out."

A pause. Even from afar you can see the fight going on inside of Minho, his lips set in a grim line and eyebrows wavering up and down his forehead, before he asks, "So who's the guy he's meeting with tonight?"

Another pause. "I only have his phone number."

Minho gives it a sardonic laugh.

"Sounds like Taehyun."

"I know he should have talked to you about it first," Haesol says, in a more serious tone this time. There's alertness rising in his chest, blood chugging through his veins in a way he can feel it underneath his skin. He's never been alone with Minho and he's sure never been alone with this particular kind of Minho, who seems just as uncertain and untamed as out of Taehyun's vague stories told over the morning toasts. "You're his boyfriend too. Seems unfair to have you left out of the discussion."

"Don't give me this bullshit now."

Haesol crosses his legs. Looking at the TV screen where the main protagonist's having a conversation with the kidnapped daughter of a billionaire and you can see it in their eyes how they're falling in love right this second, he says, "'I'm sure you'll talk to him about it and you'll figure it out together, so there's no point in me speaking for him, but I'll do it anyway." The kidnapped daughter starts kissing her kidnapper. "Even if it seems to you like he always knows what he wants, I don't think he really does. And you have to give him time."

"Thanks. Now I feel much better," he retorts sarcastically. Haesol doesn't know when it's happened but the remote control is in Minho's hand and he switches the channel to something that isn't the daughter's bra being thrown to the floor by the rough hands of the kidnapper. "You weren't watching this, were you?"

"No, it's fine."

Minho begins to swap between the channels so quick Haesol doesn't have the time to catch what each of them is broadcasting. While doing so, he says, "How the fuck can you keep it so calm?" and the flashing lights of the TV screen show Minho's shaking hand that's holding the remote. Washing powder advertisement, late-night televangelist programme, six year old football match rebroadcast.

Haesol doesn't think he should reply. And then doesn't even have the time to reply. The remote drops onto the sofa and seconds after that, Minho's body closes the distance between them. The heat of Minho's body is the first thing Haesol becomes aware of, before Minho's hands find themselves on his cheeks and before, just like that, they're suddenly kissing. The first sigh of surprise Haesol manages to swallow down but the following moan escapes. That must be what it felt like to Taehyun, so many times Haesol's seen them kiss. Minho's way of doing it is keeping Haesol in control, not letting him go until the very moment they both urgently need air. The break is for just two breaths, then he's right back at it, his hands now one cupping Haesol's chin, the other tight on the back of neck. It's chaotic and Haesol can't really find a common rhythm with him for as long as it lasts. They're already lying flat on the sofa, with Minho on either side of Haesol’s body, when Haesol decides to make an end to it.

He pushes the man's chest. Minho gets it immediately. They sit back up and Minho's breathing is audible even through the yelling of the TV and the blood pumping in through Haesol's everything.

"It's just because you're angry at Taehyun," Haesol explains, like it needs to be said, fixing the glasses on his nose.

Minho doesn't agree, doesn't oppose. He moves back to the left side of the sofa and that's where he's going to stay for the rest of the night.

 

 

 

 

Fast-forward a week.

This year in the story, Dahye's hair is dark red. She comes to the table Haesol's sitting at in the cafe, the same place where Haesol used to admire the nameless blond piano player, and she's holding tight the strap of her leatherette bag. At times like this Haesol believes they can communicate without words, on some weird telepathic level. She sits down in the chair across from Haesol.

It's after Haesol's first kiss with Minho that he didn't disclose to Taehyun and which therefore nobody else in the world knows about. He's thinking of it now, with his eyes fixated on one point on the wall, trying to put together all the pieces in order to get the whole picture, like enough strokes to make an identikit portrait.

Skipping the opening sequence of the superfluous hi's and what's up's, Haesol jumps right ahead and asks, "Remember when we met there after Jeonyul broke up with you?" Half of his mind is still in the faraway land of his memories, maybe back in the living room with Minho sitting beside him, and it's audible in his voice.

Dahye doesn't get it at first. She furrows, looking at him uncomprehendingly. "That was three years ago but yes, I remember. Also, thanks for the reminder, arsehole."

He goes on, "Remember when you asked me to promise I'll tell you when the shit hits the fan?"

"Of course I remember," and only then, as she's hearing her own words, her facial expression changes. "Please don't say it did."

Haesol opens his mouth, then closes it, then waves his hand.

"Don't say anything, baby. Take all the time that you need."

Haesol takes a deep breath. Trying to avoid whatever emotions Dahye’s face is showing at the moment, he looks around the cafe and notices the fucking piano. Taehyun's piano. The view triggers the words out of his mouth in one single string, "Minho broke up with Taehyun and Taehyun said he needs a break to think it through."

They sit in silence. It's five minutes or ten, or even fifteen, and when the waitress comes up to their table, Dahye is the one to place an order for both of them. Haesol doesn't lift his eyes.

Once the waitress is gone, Dahye brings herself to ask, "Do you mean he just left?"

Haesol nods and his caramel hair falls into his right eye with the movement. While he ignores it, Dahye reaches with her hand and tucks it behind the man's ear.

"What exactly did Minho tell him?"

"I don't know. I wasn't there. I just know they went to a club like usually and then Taehyun came back home, and he was," Haesol looks for the word, "moved like I haven't seen him since I don't remember when."

"Haesol. It's not your--"

Knowing what she's about to say, Haesol cuts in immediately. He straightens his back, his voice changing in quality, and at last locks his eyes onto Dahye's. "The worst thing is I fucking stood there saying nothing. He announced that he needs a break and I didn't say that I love him. I didn't ask him to promise he'll come back. I just stood there and I let him leave the flat without a damn word."

As soon as it all gets out of him, the cafe seems so silent to him like it's never been before. He interlaces the fingers of his two hands and hides his mouth behind them, as if part of him can't believe what he's just said, and if nobody can see his mouth, nobody will be able to tell he's been the one speaking.

"Haesol." He can see it in Dahye's eyes that she's just as surprised as he is, and it makes him continue filling in the blanks, adding next strokes to the sketch even though he doesn't want to.

"He packed his things into bags when I was at work," he says, now in a lowered voice. "I don't even know where he's going to stay now. He didn't tell me."

The silence that follows is brief but Haesol immediately catches the direction Dahye's thoughts go.

He asks her, "Did he go to Minho?"

"I don't know."

"I'm asking if you think he did."

She shrugs her shoulders, but then admits anyway, "He has to talk to someone."

"And he didn't talk to me. Because he knew I wouldn't say shit." His eyes leave Dahye's and once again wander off behind her back, as if he's just spotted someone he knows sitting a few tables away. "What was I supposed to say?"

"You know what I think." She's trying to be careful but she's still herself and the words break themselves free from her mouth as soon as Haesol indicates she can say them, "You were so lenient. You never set any rules between you two and then it bit you every time."

"What sort of rules? Was I supposed to make him choose between us?" Another silence. "Oh god."

"You don't know what he's going to do yet. He's told you it's a break."

"What if he's just said it for the sake of it."

The waitress comes with their expressos, making their conversation cut for a moment. Haesol lowers his head. Dahye thanks in the name of both of them.

"You know what I told you about Taehyun," Dahye begins, struggling to keep it all as delicate as possible. She can't do delicate and Haesol doesn't expect any delicate after his biggest lapse of judgment. "He wanted to become someone you were for him and fix the guy's life up." She's told him that before. Maybe he's just never listened. "Those things usually don't work. Case in point, you."

"You know I would let him become whoever he wants to be for Minho."

"You let him do everything."

In the last close-up, rendered blurry by the smoke and partially illuminated by the table lamp, Haesol closes his eyes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It happened that the continuation came to my mind, and so I vomited it out of my mind and onto the keyboard.


	3. The Swing

 

 

There's clubs where no matter what you do you'll inevitably get laid by the closing time. There's clubs where you first have to play a little game of flirting and touching to secure a sex partner. There's also clubs where you know the owner and you can drink until you pass out, and that's actually all you need. Which one Taehyun chooses for the night depends on his mood, but the point stands: there's various places and ways you can spend your nights, instead of staying home like a loser.

One night the aim's to fuck right away, no playing around. Taehyun enters the place and all of the coloured lights around him, all the dancing bodies and the sweaty air, it makes him horny before he even manages to order his first drink. Then, there come nights where he's going to fuck but needs to reject a couple contestants in the process to make the final one seem like a real victory, make the sex feel more special, meaningful, good on the tongue. There are also nights where his only plan is to leave a guy or two unsatisfied and wanting more. He's going to whisper to their ears, touch their knees and thighs, maybe bring them to the bathroom and make them hard. And then leave. Because once you fuck, most guys no longer look at you the same way, Taehyun knows that.

Sometimes while sitting at work and feeling bored out of his mind, he's revisiting the memories of those nights, or at least the scraps of what's left of them. This time it's an office position he's been accepted to, despite his empty cv and no experience whatsoever. Since day one he's been forever running down the corridors with photocopies, standing in the lifts with coffees, listening to the co-workers smalltalking about the weather and love affairs. His club memories, on the other hand, are all colours and sensations, warmth and cold, cigarettes smoked before the entrance and someone else's drinks that he drank when they weren't looking. It's the exact opposite of his job.

According to Taehyun's philosophy, you need those moments in your life, everyone does, when you rinse you face with cold water, prop your hands against the sink and while looking at the mirror, suddenly realise you don't know where you are and if it's actually you you're seeing reflected. When you come to notice you're not quite sure what you've been doing for the past couple hours.

Snap. He pinpoints the present moment, snatches it with his fingertips. Hold, stay still, stop wiggling out of the consciousness. The bathroom is in someone's house, he learns now. There comes a voice saying, "Hi, Taehyun."

Over his shoulder he sees a couple and the chick's the one who waves at him. The guy asks her, "Who's that?" like Taehyun can't hear it, two separate conversations.

Taehyun reaches for the towel, most probably the house owner's, hanging by the bathtub. It's dry so it's good to go. Righ that moment he remembers he's come here to wash the come off his hands.

As Taehyun's using the towel, the chick says, "We used to work together in a bar." So that's where Taehyun remembers her from. To Taehyun, she goes, "Want a cigarette?" and of course Taehyun replies with a yes, free cigarettes. As she's giving it to him, she adds, "So how's your new job?"

Taehyun shrugs his shoulders, the cigarette between his lips as an excuse from responding. The chick's boyfriend lights it up with a match, very nice of him. Taehyun stands right next to the couple, in the same pose, back against the wall, all three of them. "Boring the fuck out of me."

The chick smiles and Taehyun remembers then. They worked together, yes, Jisoo.

Snap again.

A house party, the blue, pink, yellow lights of the TV screen are reflected in the collection of pictures in glass frames hanging on the wall and in all the alcohol glasses sitting on the oak wall unit. When Taehyun dances, he's drunk, alone in a living room. Dancing, he watches his own reflection in the glasses and his shadow dancing alongside, making it two of them, as if they're dancing together. He lifts his arms, slides his hands down his throat, neck, chest, waist, watching the shadow do the same.

The lights shine in the glossy leather sofa set and in the glass coffee table. They are in the vodka bottles, glasses, mugs, beer cans gathered together and squeezed into every square inch of the table. The music's become slow, electronic, with this sad hipster voice Taehyun is so fancy of when he's totally drunk. Feels like he's trapped in a music video, alone in the room, with the remaining cigarette smoke of all the guests and the alcohol left in the the glasses of nobody knows who. His entire life up till this moment might have just been him dancing.

He freezes, realising he's holding a glass in his hand. He's forgotten about it while dancing and only now notices that his sleeve is soaked with vodka and there's vodka on the floor, also reflecting the TV sceen. He's coming back to his senses. The other Taehyun, the shadow, he's standing motionless as well.

And there's someone else, a third person, another detail approaching him with a delay.

"Getting better now?" A guy sitting on the sofa, relaxed, must have been watching Taehyun dance for some time now.

Taehyun sits down in the armchair, his body adopting his default fuck me I'm easy pose, legs crossed, even though Taehyun doesn't really mean it. The music on the TV is about partying all night or fucking up your life or maybe having all the bitches, something between the lines, really complex stuff. The man keeps smiling, the smile turning into a smirk.

He tries again and says, "Hey, Taehyun. How are you feeling?"

Like he's back into his own body, having returned from a trip somewhere else, the out of body experience is what they call it, Taehyun goes, "I'm great. Thanks. And you've been there for how long?"

"A couple songs. Came to check on you."

Taehyun ignores the last part. "I know you," he says. Furrows his eyebrows. "We've met like three parties ago, am I right?"

The man chuckles but his expression stays smug, like he knows in this particular moment in time he has more control over things than Taehyun does. And maybe he's right.

"Do you count time in parties?" the smug face asks, with a laugh, enjoying every second of it.

He's stood up now to pour vodka into one clean glass picked up from all the glasses on the table, and he's looking at Taehyun from above. It makes Taehyun consider whether his face is on the same level as the man's crotch so he could suck his cock while the man would just keep drinking his vodka. The darkness in the door interrupted by the changing lights on the TV screen, someone crossing the corridor wouldn't even notice it. Just a thought. Then he remembers he's been asked a question.

"It's helpful, yes." He remembers more. "Heaven up Here? That's the club we've met in?"

"That's the one," the man replies, like he wants to compliment Taehyun for remembering something in his state. The lights from the TV highlight his jaw, so sharp you could cut things against it. "I wasn't sure you would come today. You know. You usually skip the parties people invite you to. That's what I've been told." Taehyun doesn't ask by who.

"Sounds like me, yes," he agrees, then reaches for the glass the man's been drinking from. He gets it, now it's his own.

"In Heaven up Here, I thought we had some amazing sex but then you gave me the phone number to a sushi bar."

Taehyun chuckles. "That also sounds like me." Drinking, he asks, "You expect a biscuit for checking up on me, babe?"

"If by a biscuit, you don't really mean a biscuit, then yes."

That's where the come's from, on his hands, lips and shirt.

Snap again.

It's magically three am and he's slowly getting sober as he walks down the street. Another cigarette in his mouth, even though he didn't bring any with himself to the party. He's staggering a little, feeling like he's got chewed and spit out. It's a cycle that repeats itself every couple of nights. Every man Taehyun has ever had sex with, that's where they all come from: out of the flashing lights and the clouds of cigarette smoke, during those late nights with alcohol. They're Taehyun's opponents in the little game of kissing and fucking, where the final round is who's going to leave first after they both come.

But then there's Haesol, the cute guy in glasses.

 

 

 

 

The thing about Haesol is that he pops into Taehyun's life unexpectedly and in the most expected way at the same time. He's in the cafe every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday and always watches Taehyun play piano. He's always drinking the same coffee and always sits at the same table. While drinking coffee, he always assumes the same exact pose, legs crossed in the same way, and if he meets someone, it's always the same one woman he makes the impression of knowing really well. To Taehyun, he's almost become part of the cafe, like a chair or a painting, always staring at him.

And when he finally makes the move and buys Taehyun the damn coffee, what a cheap try, pretending it's all about the music and not the least bit about sex, Taehyun's been prepared for that too. They have sex, of course they do, and even in bed, the man's just like Taehyun's expected him to be, the slow down and turn off the lights type. His flat is just like Taehyun imagined, the things inside of it, every single item, you can see it on Haesol's face that he owns them he's so predictable.

From then on, despite the days and weeks passing, whenever Taehyun enters the cafe and directs his steps towards the piano to make some extra money from the cafe's owner, one brief glance over the shoulder is enough to know that Haesol's sitting in the same spot and looking at him. Skinny legs crossed at the knee, one wrist lazily moving to stir the coffee. And what's in Haesol's eyes is the same sort of interest Taehyun saw on their first encounter.

But maybe by saying, "I think I want a relationship," one rosy morning, he manages to at last take Taehyun by surprise. Taehyun's forced to update the theory. No longer a boring guy looking for exciting sex with a young stranger. Now he wants Taehyun full-time: a stupid romantic actually believing Taehyun's someone he isn't.

So Taehyun says yes.

In the earliest stage of it all, Taehyun likes to think that him dating Haesol is an experiment of sorts because he has guesses to verify and points to score in the process. For this reason alone it's worth saying, "Alright, let's do the boyfriends thingy, Mr Kim."

He agrees to become someone's boyfriend and then, the first thing he does that very same day, right after finishing his work at the office, is get his make-up done, squeeze his arse into the tighest pair of leather jeans he owns and then find a fuck straight away, ten minutes into the party. That's his mood for the night. The mood for fucking in someone's bedroom upstairs, his face pushed into the pillow that smells like someone's shower gel and flowery washing powder and the bed making all those ridiculous creaking noises that you know from homemade porn. He does it to convince himself that nothing's changed. The guy in the glasses doesn't change a thing in his life.

But then, the guy in the glasses comes back to his mind as he's sucking a cock and while he's being rimmed. The phone that's lying just centimetres away from Taehyun's face, it might or might now be showing Haesol's phone number as it's buzzing. That day he realises that the idea of having this random guy from the cafe turned boyfriend call him during sex is enough to get him off.

After they're done, the fuck guy whose name Taehyun didn't bother asking for and wouldn't remember anyway, he takes the condom off his big dick and casually says, "Remember to text him back." He points at the phone with the hand that's holding the condom. It makes Taehyun giggle on the bed.

One day, right after fucking another stranger in a gay club's toilet, Taehyun goes to Haesol.

It's a short scene happening in the corridor of the man's flat, or at the entrance to it, to be exact. Taehyun's no longer drunk but you can smell the alcohol in the air around him even from afar, and you may also smell sweat. Sex. Taehyun's quick fuck.

Leaning with one hand against the doorframe, Taehyun goes, "Mind if I stay overnight?"

Haesol's in slippers and pyjamas. He's holding the door for a while, like maybe he isn't going to let Taehyun in. Maybe instead he'll say how sick he is of Taehyun being like this. Treating him this way. What is he thinking.

Bu Haesol goes, "Come right in."

 

 

 

 

From then on, every time Taehyun goes to a club the same thought crosses his mind that this might be the day Haesol says, it's enough.

He moves in to Haesol's flat in March.

One night, he comes back home from the party, two am on his phone the last time he checked and now it's out of battery, only to see Haesol sit with a book in the light of a single lamp in the living room, like a mafioso in an action flick or maybe like a parent waiting for their kid to come back home from a secret party. With the eyes of his imagination, Taehyun can see Haesol saying the words. He wants to be ready for them. He wants to hear Haesol say them and then respond with, "I knew you would break up with me," in his best, most prepared voice. Like it's him winning and not the other way around, a constant battle in his head.

Sometimes he sits in the bar and catches himself forgetting to drink, forgetting to dance and look for the hot guys, and instead just plotting in his head what he would do when finally confronted by Haesol. He freezes by the counter for an hour or two, with a pink drink in one hand and with that big guy with big muscles staring at him from two bar stools of a distance, ignored, and just indites his whole speech. I knew you're this kind of guy, Kim Haesol. I know guys like you. I knew you would do this.

Because he really wants to know.

But then Haesol, in his striped pyjamas and his grey bathrobe, hair wet from shower and legs tucked under him, lifts his eyes from the book and looks at Taehyun over his glasses. He says, "How are you feeling, playboy?" and he's smiling like it's a funny joke he's saying.

Sometimes when Taehyun comes back home earlier at night, Haesol welcomes him with a kiss, as if it doesn't matter that Taehyun smells of sex and the other guy's cologne. Like Haesol's got used to it, no problem.

One time they're sitting in the living room, on the couch, Haesol with another book of his, and Taehyun begins yet again, "I have a new theory."

Haesol puts the book down, slightly, still keeping it open with his two fingers like he knows he's about to go back to reading it in a second. "So you're still theorising about me?"

"One time I'll certainly get it right, and maybe today's the lucky day."

Haesol doesn't comment on whether it would be lucky or not, just places his elbow on the back of the couch and nods his head to let Taehyun continue, a bit unwilling but still curious.

"I think the real reason you're with me is exactly because I'm screwing other guys." Haesol frowns slightly but doesn't oppose. Taehyun takes it as a good sign. His legs crossed, he leans towards Haesol and continues, "I'm your dream come true because your biggest kink ever has always been to have a boyfriend who screws around, and every time I'm leaving for a party you're just jerking off thinking about me being fucked and you not participating in it."

There's a tense moment of silence, and Taehyun thinks he's really got it this time and his heart momentarily drops like he can't breathe.

Then comes Haesol's sigh. He places the bookmark between the pages and the book on top of the coffee table. "Taehyun."

"Let me finish first." Haesol lets him. "You've said it yourself. You're shy, you wouldn't tell about it to anyone. Maybe part of the appeal is that nobody knows. That I don't know."

"No, I don't jerk off every night you're out."

"You don't?"

"It's really not about sex."

"It isn't?"

There are thoughts crossing Haesol's face and his jaw moves a little back and forth, like he's rolling something on his tongue. "Not necessarily."

Taehyun's eyebrows drop. The tension now gone from the air, like they snapped back those two minutes of Taehyun's talking and none of it has happened, Taehyun can't decide if he's disappointed or exactly the opposite, or both at the same time.

 

 

 

 

The moment Taehyun finds particularly important for their relationship is at one of the club parties Taehyun goes to just because. He doesn't rememeber the beginning of it, or any specific details about it, only that he doesn't recognise a single person around him. There's a lot of drinking and sweets involved and one of those makes him fly off the planet right away, midway through the party. Or maybe it's the mixing part that he shouldn't have done. He starts panicking, that's what happens next. Locking himself in one of the toilet stalls, he calls Haesol and knows he isn't going to remember a single thing he'll tell him, except that he needs him there right in this moment, please, come for me, take me home, please, please, and that he's scared shitless.

The next thing he knows, Haesol's waiting before the club, just like he must have promised over the phone. He's standing by his car, one hand shoved into the front pocket of his dark jeans, looking at the people leaving and coming into the club in different stages of intoxication. Glasses on his nose reflecting the neon signs, he's nervously fidgeting with the car keys in the other hand, flipping it around his index finger. For a moment, this must be the most relived Taehyun's ever felt seeing someone.

He's no longer high, just drunk, and he comes up to Haesol wearing only his t-shirt because where he's left the rest of his clothes he's no idea by this point. He tries to play it out cool, even though it must be the least cool he's ever been in front of a man.

"I decided to use my boyfriend card for the first time. You really came here fast."

Haesol doesn't budge an inch. Before replying, he proceeds to scrutinise Taehyun's face and body, like he's estimating the danger. At that, Taehyun's suddenly amused, a new emotion entering the whirl of all the others. Haesol definitely doesn't get the funny part of it all. "What happened?" he asks, right out of the gate.

"I shouldn't have mixed all the vodka and beer and energy drinks."

"And that's it?"

"That's it." If he's ever had a dad to pick him from secret parties, that's what it would have looked like.

Haesol remains silent for a few moments longer, still looking at Taehyun, analysing, scanning him through those big, funny glasses of his. "Are you okay?"

"I'm okay now. As you can clearly see." When Haesol doesn's stop looking so alert, Taehyun produces a feigned laugh and makes a gesture with his hands, which makes him a bit dizzy. The amusement escapes him just as quick as it appeared. "So that's the real Taehyun, just as I was saying. That's me. How do I look to you right now?"

Even with all the alcohol in his body, Taehyun can tell that Haesol thinks he's more drunk than he actually is. He carefully chooses words while at the same time looking at Taehyun suspiciously, like expecting him to faint and preparing on how to catch him mid-fall. "Pretty. But also like shit."

"And I feel like shit," Taehyun admits. "I hope I didn't say anything stupid over the phone. I wasn't thinking logically."

They get into the car and only then, when the club music and people's yelling get muffled, Haesol turns to Taehyun with his one hand on the wheel. "You would tell me if something happened, right?"

Taehyun sighs. "But nothing did."

"That's what you're going with?" When Taehyun stays silent, Haesol nods his head.

Taehyun can't tell yet if it all feels alright or not, having Haesol come pick him up, ask questions and look at him this way. And whether he should let it be happening.

Only once the engine starts and Haesol's forced to look at the road only, Taehyun goes, "You must think so low of me now." Elbow against the car door armrest, chin in hand, he's watching Haesol's profile and the street lights reflecting in his glasses.

"That's not true."

"But one thing's certain, you can't say I didn't warn you."

"I'm glad you called me," Haesol's voice sounds soft but also firm, and Taehyun can't quite comprehend how it works. "I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right in this moment."

Taehyun produces a low, throaty noise. "Don't say that. I'm still drunk and it's making me emotional."

The street lights render Haesol's face blue, yellow and pink. Taehyun can swear he spots a faint smile crossing the man's face between the yellow and pink, like he's just thought about something. "I wish you would do that always."

"Do what?"

"Tell me when you're going out so I'm by the phone and you can call me if something happens or you need a lift."

"Like a pimp?"

Haesol chuckles, but Taehyun can tell the word irritated him.

"More like a boyfriend, that's what I meant."

 

 

 

 

Three years later, it's at one of such exact same house parties where Taehyun goes and expects Haesol to pick him up afterwards, that Taehyun meets Minho. He's sitting in the open shower cabin, his legs spread half on the bath rug, watching the smoke curl out of his cigarettes, one cigarette after another, one package after another, slowly filling up the space of the bathroom like a gas chamber.

Every now and then someone comes in and they're usually too drunk to notice Taehyun's presence. They come in to puke, take a leak, wash their hands. Taehyun becomes their silent audience looking upwards. One time there comes a horny couple and Taehyun has to clear his throat and say, "It's already taken. Go fuck upstairs," between the next puffs on the cigarette. When the door opens, the music grows louder, and above the music there's the yelling of people's voices. Taehyun wants to be part of it, he really does. Dancing and screaming was exactly what Taehyun has planned for the night, with a flashy orgasm from a stranger as the cherry on top. If there's no dick, he's no other plan. Just as he's wondering about it, thinking that it wasn't his best decision to leave Haesol home alone, another one of those drunk people enter.

White t-shirt, black hair, sky blue denim jacket. Taehyun watches him lock the door and one of the two water bottles he's taken with himself falls to the floor and rolls towards the basin. If Taehyun's guessing, the guy's about to vomit. Or start crying, that's why the locked door. The way his hands are shaking and his facial expression seems distant, Taehyun starts making the bets in his head. Locked together in a bathroom, what's the possibility of Taehyun ending up having sex with him. He's running out of time and he doesn't have that many options.

To the denim jacket guy, now seated on the closed toilet, Taehyun goes, "Hello there, handsome." That's when he's spotted.

Turning his vacant eyes to Taehyun, the guy seems to be having his little out of body and into the deepest part of his mind experience, and doesn't seem to have understood Taehyun's words. "Give me ten minutes," he blurts out.

"That's how long you're gonna puke?"

The denim jacket guy doesn't respond. Taehyun says he agrees to give him the ten minutes he's asked for.

The guy's wearing a silver watch on his left wrist. Well-paid job. He's slim and with an outline of muscles underneath the white t-shirt. Perhaps has a gym membership to regularly work out to impress someone he knows. No engagment ring. Either single or adulterous. Soft hands. Means he's a white collar worker spending hours at the desk. There's something extremely attractive about people Taehyun doesn't know, something that pulls him in, makes him want to discover them and verify his first impressions.

After ten minutes, the denim jacket guy goes, "This is supposed to be my best year ever."

And Taehyun giggles. "Think you can change your life in just one day?"

The guy's sitting on the toilet with his legs apart, elbows on knees, hands running through his slick black hair. "I have to tell myself I can, otherwise I won't ever try to change things."

Taehyun looks into his packet of cigarettes. Four left. Lighting up another one, he asks, "What is it that you're running away from then?"

The denim jacket guy makes a nervous chuckle. He keeps combing his hair with his fingers, drunk and with his eyes going all around the bathroom. Taehyun finds it funny. "It's less about running away and more about running towards. I need somewhere to run to. I can't stay in one place forever."

Taehyun smiles around the cigarette. "What's holding you then?" Letting the smoke out through his nostrils, he makes a guess, "Wife, children and bank loans to pay off?"

The denim jacket guy shakes his head vigoriously. "It's about small things. Small things have the biggest impact."

"Small things like what?"

"Like a mug you drink your morning coffee in." Taehyun's eyes go into slits as he's looking at the man's face. Handsome, big, sharp. He tips his chin for the man to go on. "It's the best mug you can find, fits just the right amount of coffee you want to begin your every day with. The only problem is the logo. That's a company mug with a logo of where you work at. So you start every day remembering about your shit job, your shit boss, and all the people you hate but with whom you spend most of the time of your life now."

That's why Taehyun never stays in one job for too long. But he doesn't say that, it's the guy's time to speak. Taehyun's there only to listen and ask follow-up questions. And if he leads it the right way, maybe he'll get a prize right before the fireworks go off.

"What's wrong with the job?"

"Listen--" The guy makes a pause. He wants to say Taehyun's name but doesn't know it yet.

"Taehyun."

"Taehyun," he repeats, in his drunk, gibberish speaking voice. "I'm Minho."

"Nice to meet you, Minho."

"I've done something awful years ago and that's what holds me in place."

Taehyun smiles and lets the smoke out of his mouth again. "Did you murder someone?" Minho furrows his thick, black eyebrows. With his eyebrows furrowed, he looks even more sexy. "If you didn't murder anyone, we're fine."

"I slept with my best friend's wife." Taehyun nods his head. Now having the words out of him, Minho scratches his neck and runs his fingers through his hair again. "I regret it all the time."

"If you regret it, then maybe you're not that big of an arsehole."

"It was before their wedding. She was supposed to help write me the speech that I would make at the reception." He goes on on the subject, giving away some of the more spicy details that Taehyun isn't expecting, and just as he's doing that, Taehyun finishes the cigarette. He throws it behind his back, into the shower cabin. "I told him about it because he's my best friend. We work together. We see each other every day."

"He didn't forgive you, did he?" In response, Minho laughs nervously and something in the sound, something very delicate and vulnerable, makes Taehyun feel things. He leans towards the man. "He still keeps it against you? Makes him a shitty friend, if you ask me."

Minho doesn't reply. In his drunken voice, he confesses, "I want to fall in love." He's sitting on the closed lid of the toilet and breathing the smoke Taehyun's letting out.

"Because of your best friend?"

"Because of many things." He taps with his sports shoes against the bathroom tiles. At the same moment, someone taps at the door. They both ignore it. "Don't you ever get scared of being left alone?"

For a moment, Taehyun forgets to smoke. "I do. Feels shitty."

"Maybe if I find someone, he'll finally forgive me." He's speaking of his friend again. The knocking on the door continues, this time a bit louder.

"You believe in people forgiving?"

"You're asking if I do, or you're just saying Seunghoon won't forgive me?"

Taehyun tries to note the name in his mind, in case it would ever turn out to be useful. "Just in general." He gives it a thought. "You can disappoint someone once and hard, but you can do it on a regular basis. What's worse?"

The drunk denim jacket guy hesitates before he goes, "On a regular basis." Taehyun nods, a bit apathetically. "Just like my mother did."

"What did she do?"

"Or what she didn't do." The knocking has stopped, Taehyun now takes notice. All of the smoke he's produced is now hanging below the ceiling. "She was always busy. Kept sending me places, instead of spending time together. Made me stay overnight at her friends' houses." Minho's eyebrows furrow. "Now when I think of her, I'm seeing many blurred faces, like when you put a couple photos one onto another."

"Family issues. I know that one."

"Why are we talking about it?"

Taehyun smiles. "You're really drunk and most probably won't remember any of it tomorrow."

"That's true."

"And me..." He gives it a thought. "I guess I like talking to drunk guys. Makes you more honest."

Minho smiles at it too, half amused and half miserable, like he doesn't fully realise what Taehyun's saying and in consequence what he's smiling at. There's still time until midnight and they spend all of it talking, and the longer they talk, the better it feels. Up until the counting, the sound of which reaches them the bathroom door. New Year starting in ten...

Taehyun stops Minho midway through a sentence, something about his fears and wishes, secrets of his inner life. He goes, "Minho," and Minho looks at him, alert. "You don't have to be alone right now. I want us to start the new year in a proper way."

Now seven...

Minho still doesn't get it. Taehyun stands up from the shower cabin, and while standing up proceeds to take off his t-shirt, pulling it over his head in one swift motion and dropping it to the bathroom tiles. Then he starts unzipping his trousers.

"What do you mean?"

Four...

"Let's fuck." Just the words alone, without Minho's reaction to them, make Taehyun feel excited. Minho's eyes watch him come up and then sit on his lap, still a bit unfocused with alcohol. "The first thing I want to do in the new year is have you come inside of me."

 

 

 

 

Taehyun manages to wake up on time to drink morning coffee with Haesol, first one this year. From where they're sitting at the kitchen island, facing one another, they can also see Minho's body slumped onto the living room sofa and covered with a blanket in a way that only his feet in white socks poke from underneath it. With his eyes looking in that direction and lips by the coffee mug, Haesol asks, "So what's so special about this one?"

Taehyun smiles. This one, another one in the collection of men Taehyun slept with that Haesol has the occasion to see. Only a couple hours ago they were carrying Minho into the car and then out of the car and upstairs.

Taehyun goes, "He's a weird guy," and takes a sip of his moka pot coffee. With sugar. Lots of sugar that he had to add himself, because Haesol never drinks sweet himself. "Told me some interesting things about himself when we were sitting in the bathroom. Now I'm expecting a sequel."

Haesol's wearing one of his freshly ironed work suits, which perfectly contrasts with Taehyun's yesterday's outfit of a provocative party crasher. In moments like this one, a thought crosses Taehyun's mind that their looks make it hard to accuse them of even knowing each other.

"You were sitting in a bathroom?" Haesol pretends to be surprised. Only pretends because when it comes to Taehyun, he never seems to be surprised by anything, no matter how much Taehyun tries. "During a party?"

"Wasn't the best party if I'm being honest." Haesol nods. "Until he came around, that is. His name's Minho by the way."

"Should I remember it?"

"I'm planning to perhaps meet with him again." He looks for a reaction on Haesol's face, but there isn't much to be spotted. "What do you say?"

"I say, why not."

In response, Taehyun leans over the kitchen island and initiates a kiss that lasts a couple moments and involves Taehyun's hands brushing Haesol's hair behind his ear. When their lips part, he says, "But tonight I'll be all yours. Promise. I'm yet to give you the New Year's Eve blowjob."

"I'm looking forward to it," Haesol admits. There's not a bit of jealousy or sourness in his look, rather the opposite, and as it's usually the case, it makes Taehyun slightly light-headed.

"You should be. I'll make it special." With Minho sleeping meters away, it's both amusing and exciting to be promising that to Haesol.

"Don't forget to get him something to drink," Haesol says then, standing up and heading towards the sink with his empty mug. "And you could prepare some toasts as well." He looks at the watch on his thin wrist. "I think I gotta go now. Call me if something happens."

For a moment they're just looking at each other, from a distance, Taehyun with a soft smile on his lips. "Happy New Year, babe."

 

 

 

 

The subject of Minho comes up a couple of weeks later, after Haesol bumps into him at home, on numerous occasions but without ever talking to him, like he feels obliged to limit his own presence to bare minimum and keep himself in some other separate dimension. As Taehyun never forces any contact between them, each time they play the funny little game of avoiding each other's eye contact.

So the conversation happens on a weekend, with the two of them still lying in bed after their morning sex and Haesol with his head propped against Taehyun's chest. Taehyun's fingers brush Haesol's sweaty blond hair and he watches the two little moles located around the man's lips, one above them and one just right near the corner, their movement according to the movement of the lips. The man's breathing has slowed down and stabilised into those slow, peaceful little sounds Taehyun hears from above, which make him peaceful as well. One thing about Haesol he's learned only after three years of a relationship and multiple experiments is that as long as Taehyun wants for them to be hugging, snuggling, lying next to each other, Haesol will let him. He won't ever be the one stopping the touch, always obediently staying by Taehyun's side.

Now, Taehyun notices Haesol's stare on the stuffed rabbit the size of a hand standing on their bedside table. Before Haesol even asks, Taehyun says, "It's from a pupil."

Haesol's body stirs a little so he can sneak a peak up at Taehyun's face, and the two moles move upwards together with the smile. "That's what I was thinking."

Taehyun giggles and continues brushing Haesol's blond hair, making Haesol produce a sound quite close to a purr. "She said I'm her favourite teacher and she wants to marry me when she gets older."

Haesol giggles as well, and it sends a shiver down Taehyun's back. "Don't all your pupils say that?"

"You're right." He hesitates. "Do you think I should tell them to stop bringing me things? I'm not sure if their parents know and I feel like if they did, they wouldn't approve of it."

"It's all small things, don't worry," Haesol says. "I want to have the fridge covered with Christmas cards this year too."

Taehyun takes the hand from the man's head and starts counting on it. "Pins, trading cards, sweets, lover letters..." He looks down at Haesol, who now has his eyes closed. "But you don't need to get jealous."

Haesol's eyes stay closed as his lips say, "You know I'm not."

Taehyun nods, more to himself than to Haesol. "Speaking of kids, do you think Dahye will finally have one?"

"She's a lesbian. And not really the motherly type. Chances are pretty low."

"I'm thinking of that one woman she dated. She had a child, right?" Taehyun tries to remember, but then realises that maybe he fails to pay enough attention to his boyfriend's friends. "Did they break up?"

"Why?"

"I wanted to say you would be a good uncle."

Haesol giggles again. His eyes now open, he changes his position, now angling up to place a kiss on Taehyun's lips. Here, with Haesol kissing him, both of them under the duvet, lying in a bedroom at eleven am as if they don't have a single worry in the world, Taehyun suddenly feels like he's in a different dimension than his own. The same way Haesol must feel when seeing Minho. Where am I? Why is my boyfriend kissing this man? Am I an intruder? Do they live here together?

Taehyun has the question at the tip of his tongue and when the kiss ends, the words escape together with a breathe out, "Could you go on a date with Minho?"

Haesol's head doesn't go back to its place against Taehyun's chest, instead he sits up. "Explain?"

"I think I'm falling in love with him, and this is the part where I need you to jump in."

First thing Haesol does is draw a heavy sigh. He doesn't leave the bed, noticeably. "I think it's getting more difficult each time now. Maybe I'm getting old."

Taehyun's fingers find their way back to the man's hair. He takes a strand between two fingers and curls it. "You know how you always speak about yourself like you're sixty and one day you won't be able to move out of bed."

"I certainly can't move out of bed now." Then he adds, "I don't have the stamina like yours."

"Alright." Taehyun slowly gets out of the bed. He slides his feet into Haesol's slippers and reaches for Haesol's bathrobe. "I'll get you coffee and you think about it."

"You know we shouldn't drink coffee on an empty stomach."

"Shut up, dad. We always do."

Taehyun feels how Haesol's eyes lead him out of the bedroom, the slippers making quaking sounds when Taehyun walks in them. Only in the kitchen, somewhat gaining more confidence when Haesol can't see him, he goes, "I realised last night that when he speaks it just makes my heart flutter," loud enough to let Haesol hear him in the other room. "I feel like we have some next level connection."

There comes a reply from the bedroom. "If you say so."

"I mean, he's completely different from me and yet speaking to him goes so smooth."

The conversation takes a break for the time it takes Taehyun to grind the coffee beans, prepare the moka pot and get the water to boil. Then, walking back into the bedroom with two mugs, he continues speaking like he's never stopped. "I love it how his eyebrows furrow when he's sad. And this little mole moving on the tip of his nose when he crinkles it." He looks at Haesol. Haesols takes his mug. "And when he gets shy, it makes me think of you too."

Taehyun puts his mug on the bedside table and leans over the bed, two hands on either side of Haesol's body, to kiss him again. Haesol takes the kiss.

"Let's do it this way," Taehyun says, when he snuggles back under the duvet. "We'll give it an hour and then if you don't like him, you'll leave the room and you'll pretend you got a call from work. How's that for a plan?" Haesol sniggers. "You'll say, So sorry boys but I gotta go to work. It was great meeting you. Of course it wasn't great but he won't know." He sees Haesol doesn't take it seriously. He digs a finger into Haesol's naked shoulder. "Come on. Repeat after me. You have to practice your lying."

Haesol rolls his eyes, but then follows the instruction with an amusement in his tone, "Sorry boys but I gotta go."

"Exactly. You'll try a couple times more and it'll get believable."

 

 

 

 

The first man Taehyun presented to Haesol as a potential third piece of the puzzle, a boyfriend they could share in a triad, that also started off as an experiment. First year of his relationship with Haesol, Taehyun liked doing things just to see Haesol react to them. Like poking a motionless object with a stick, Taehyun was looking for ways to ignite a flame in Haesol. Make him snap. In Taehyun's mind, there must have been a catch behind a man like Haesol. He broached the subject at one morning coffee, the setting which seemed to accompany many of their important conversations, and Haesol agreed, without even giving it much thought. A week later, Taehyun had his first threesome with his boyfriend participating in it.

Now, one late morning, he's in bed with Minho, Minho occupying Haesol's side in the bed and Haesol nowhere in sight. Taehyun rubs his eyes as he slowly props himself up. Minho's looking at him with a smile that's weirdly insincere, in a way that Taehyun knows could mean a longer story from Minho's life, about his mother or his numerous other mothers, or his receding hairline. Minho is all stories and raw emotions.

"What time is it?" he asks, and Minho must know what's the meaning behind the words.

"He's already left for work."

Leaning to kiss Minho's forehead, Taehyun still looks around as if expecting Haesol be somewhere near in sight. Minho's slightly bigger in frame, feels like he always takes up more space, more of Taehyun's vision, and in consequence may just as well hide Haesol behind himself.

"How did you sleep?"

When Minho traces the bones in Taehyun's cheeks, the way people who still learn each other's curves and hollows do it, Taehyun purrs, "Warm and peaceful, like I always sleep with my both boys by my side."

He spots the way Minho fails to smooth the worry from his forehead on time for Taehyun to blink and miss it. "We talked a little when you were sleeping."

"Really?" Taehyun's now lying with his head on Minho's lap, looking at him from his lap up. "You mean talk talk or you mean, today's such a nice weather, yes indeed?"

"He's really--" Minho gives it a moment's hesitation, clearly being careful when it comes to Taehyun's boyfriend in a way that amuses Taehyun very much, "a playing it safe guy."

"That's right."

"Is he...?" A pause.

Taehyun prompts then, "Always like this?" Part of him feeling like he's daydreaming, he leads his one hand under Minho's white pyjamas top and up his chest, trying to locate the spot where he could feel the man's heart beating and estimate his level of nervousness. "Or you mean to ask if I think it's not clicking between you two?"

"Be serious for a second." Minho grips Taehyun's wrist through his pyjamas top, making it stop somewhere above his belly button. Taehyun giggles.

"What makes you think I'm not?" Still from Minho's lap and relaxed as if in a pleasant dream, he watches the man's face, lit up by the morning sunrise so bright it leaves his hair almost shining silver.

"It's been some time now," Minho says. "I think you could talk to him but you choose not to."

"You want to have sex with my boyfriend so bad?"

Minho's stomach shudders under Taehyun's fingers and his reply comes all of a sudden, awkwardly blurted out as if it's wrong time and place altogether and they both know about it. "I love you, Taehyun."

Taehyun's eyes shift up to Minho's face whose expression is caught halfway between expectancy and confusion. It seems like he stops breathing for a moment and Taehyun allows himself to drag this moment for a bit longer. "I love you too," he says then, with ease, before sitting up and angling his face up to cover Minho's lips with his own. It's as simple as that because in this exact moment in time, he's sure of his feelings towards Minho like he's never been sure about anything else in the world.

A week later it all crumbles down anyway.

 

 

 

 

When the door opens, Taehyun knows that it's Haesol just by the sound of his suede chelsea boots stepping in. And the specific way he walks. A slow but rhytmical gait, as if he always makes sure to keep his eyes down to the floor and avoid squashing an insect. Then, the standard sequence of noises: hanging the coat, putting the keys onto the foyer table. The same way as usual.

He comes into the bedroom to the sight of Taehyun kneeling before a pulled out drawer and a bag, midway through transferring his clothes from one to the other. The sound of the suede chelsea boots stops in the doorway.

Without looking over his shoulder, Taehyun notices the little moment of hesitancy in which Haesol may be expecting him to be the one starting the conversation, like he's done many times before. Only when Taehyun stays silent for long enough does Haesol finally go, "Are you going somewhere?"

Taehyun lifts his eyes. He's already told himself, no beating around the bush. "Minho broke up with me."

Haesol doesn't react. No surprise, no nothing.

"I'm packing because I need to think it all through," he continues, now with a faint edge of anger in his voice, which he didn't intend but also isn't going to stop now. "I need to think what to do with him and us, with everything, and I need to be alone for that."

He isn't sure what he's expecting Haesol to do or say, or what he wants to find in the man's facial expression or gesture, what sort of emotion, but he knows there isn't any of that. Frozen to the spot, Haesol keeps one hand in the front pocket of his trousers and silently looks down at Taehyun, enough space next to him for Taehyun to go through the doorway without touching him. And that's how Taehyun chooses to read it. It's an approval. He's been right all along, and this is the moment he's been waiting all this time but for which in the end he isn't ready. Haesol must be relieved.

He doesn't even budge when Taehyun passes by him, carrying the two bags. From the corridor, Taehyun tells him, "I left some of my stuff but it's nothing important."

 

 

 

 

He finds the phone number to an ex-coworker with whom he hasn't talked ever since being fired, and that's where he goes afterwards to leave his bags and ask if he'll be able to crash for a couple days. Then, he reacts in the way that he knows works best for him. He meets up with one of his regular sex partners.

He goes to the motel where they have a room booked for the whole night, and his only plan is to get his mind off the worries. The guy's tall, muscled, four inches. Taehyun knows his name because he has it saved on his phone, even though he can't swear it's the real one. There was a time, back before he met Haesol, when he used to come up with fake names himself, so that the guys would have it more difficult trying to find him. Somehow fucking around became much easier with a boyfriend waiting at home, someone to worry about him if he ever went missing.

The motel room's scantly furnished and a year's layer of dust on the headboard of the bed seems enough of a statement about the motel owner's approach to their business. A perfect spot for a one-night stand. A quick fuck. The guy's going to leave right afterwards and Taehyun will have the place for himself for the rest of the night, that's the plan he's developing in his head as they enter and as Taehyun's immediately pinned against the locked door.

What follows is a long session of mouth-sucking during which Taehyun catches himself thinking about Minho. And Haesol. Interchangeably. Somehow thinking about one always triggers the image of the other, making it a never-ending circle of mind-numbing thoughts, full of the helpless indecisiveness that gets Taehyun feeling sick.

But it goes on.

The guy takes Taehyun's hand and shoves it into his unzipped pants, making him touch his erection through his briefs. "Always coming back for more, right, baby? Want this big dick your boyfriend can't give you, right?"

The exact dirty talk Taehyun's taught him to do. Only this time he's forced to fake a moan in response to it, as his fingers feel the erection grow under his touch. Did Minho really mean it calling him a slut. Or was he just his big insecure self as usual.

The guy tangles his fingers into Taehyun's hair and drags him closer, then holding him in place as the kissing continues and gets more sloppy and wet in the process. "Did you tell him how much fun you're gonna have without him?" With the other hand, he keeps operating Taehyun's hand in his trousers.

They move from the door to the bed and in just a flicker of an eyelid Taehyun's in his underwear, lying on his back, and only then, with genuine surprise, he realises he isn't turned on. At all.

With the guy's face moving down his chest, every couple of centimeters stamping love bites on his skin for Haesol so see it all, down on the way to Taehyun's flaccid cock, Taehyun blurts out, "I can't do it."

It's the tone in which his words come out of his throat. It makes him sound panicked and they both flinch in reaction. In just one second, the man's position changes, he's sitting on the other side of the bed, his muscled back covered with tattoos tensed and hunched.

"What's going on?"

It's so god damn stupid. "I'm sorry," he mumbles embarassed, "I can't do it."

The heat drops down, the sexual tension, even though one-sided, is gone too. Too embarassed to even sit on the bed, Taehyun crawls off of it and onto the floor, to sit propped against it and curl himself into a smaller size, holding his knees with his arms.

"Did I do something?"

"It's not you."

"What happened?"

Taehyun takes a deep breath, not knowing what to do next. There are moments in your life, when you hug your knees and you feel your heart beats in every inch of your body, and your eyes are staring at the dirty carpet dirtier in the close-up while you're sitting in a dingy motel room with a guy about whom you only know what's his kinks and favourite positions, and you know you've got yourself into it on your own wish. Another deep breath.

"I'm the worst fucking boyfriend," he says, so quickly like it's his intension for the words to be unintelligible.  
"Don't you like inform your boyfriend about being here?" The guy asks from the bed, behind Taehyun's back, clearly confused. Not as much as Taehyun though. "Like, uhm, you've told me he knows, right?"

"I informed my one boyfriend and not the other."

"Two boyfriends?" In any other circumstance, the awkward laughter the man produces, clearly not expecting all this from Taehyun, it would all be an amusing moment to reminisce about in the future. The man makes an attempt to joke, "Aren't you looking for a third one maybe?"

Taehyun feels his eyebrows drop down his forehead, and even though the man can't see it, he goes:

"Alright, not funny, I'm sorry."

"We broke up."

Another pause. "Who with who?"

"Minho broke up with me and I with Haesol."

Obviously the man doesn't know either of the names, but he goes, "Oh shit," nevertheless.

Taehyun hears how the body moves heavy against the creaking bed and then drop onto the floor. The man's now sitting beside him on the floor, keeping a noticeable distance.

"I can't do. That's why we broke up," Taehyun continues. "That's why I came here. To fuck it all."

"I thought you came here to fuck me." Another joke. Both of them with their backs against the bed, Taehyun's trying to control his breathing. "Do you want to talk about it or--?"

Taehyun shakes his head no before he even finishes the question.

A little bit of a break. They stay silent and then the man stands up to pick something out of his bag lying on the floor right next to the door where it all started. Taehyun can hear it before seeing it.

"Here," the man says. He sits back down and holds the object towards Taehyun but without looking at Taehyun, as if his look would shy Taehyun away. "Take those chocolates, seriously."

"Listen. Just because I'm--"

"It's not a payment. I'm telling you that every time. I just know you like chocolates."

He feels like Minho when he says, "And why do you know that?"

He sees how the man rolls his eyes. In any other circumstance, having a man sit on the dirty motel room carpet, naked and holding a packet of chocolates, it would make Taehyun giggle.

The man goes, "I feel like you just underestimate people." Then he says, "You can tell me whatever you want."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still wanted to keep it open ended but add more information, that's what came out.


End file.
